Leigh: Welcome back to another episode of Hotel Bar Sessions. I am Leigh Johnson and I'm joined by my fabulous co-hosts, David Gunkel and Rick Lee and today we are going to try to figure out whether or not God exists... but before we do that, like most people who are trying to figure out whether God exists, we're going to pour ourselves drinks and talk about what might be right or wrong with the world.

So David, let me go to you first. What are you drinking and what are you ranting or raving about?

David: Yeah, so this week I'm going to be ordering an entire bottle of Sobieski vodka, and that's because I will be ranting about our election.

Rick: Can we just go back to talking about whether God exists?

David: We are, as everyone will recognize, on the verge of a presidential election. And I'm seeing, again, a lot of revelations about the former president and people talking about fascism and Hitler's generals, etc. I'm worried that when we have these conversations, we're sort of targeting DonaldTrump as the boogeyman here. And what really has me worried is not so much Donald Trump, but the fact that there is a large part of the American populace, my fellow citizens, that are willing to vote for this man and are not moved by all these new revelations.

Trump will come and go and Trump's like him will come and go, but the electorate will stay. And I'm really worried about what we do post-election with regards to the fact that these people are still willing to vote for fascism. That is a concern that I think persists beyond Donald Trump.

Leigh: 100 percent agree.

David: Yeah.

Leigh: Rick, what about you?

Rick: I am going to have a Manhattan and today I am ranting about Elon Musk.

So, I know there are tons and tons and tons of reasons to rant about Elon Musk-- and he could easily become the next Ron DeSantis of our podcast-- but today, I just want to focus on one point in particular: that Elon Musk, apparently, now we've discovered, has his own foreign policy agenda. He has been conversing with Vladimir Putin and using his Starlink internet satellite network as a foreign policy tool. This is incredibly dangerous and his closeness to Trump-- see David's rant-- is all the more terrifying.

Elon Musk is just a piece of shit on the Ron DeSantis level.

Leigh: That's low.

Rick: Leigh, what about you?

Leigh: I'm going to have a spicy Bloody Mary today. I think my rave is going to balance your rant a little bit. I'm raving about tech leaders who actually write.

Earlier this month, Dario Amadai, who's the CEO of Anthropic, wrote an essay, a long essay, like a 14,000-word essay, called “Machines of Loving Grace,” in which he sort of lays out what he sees as the optimistic future of AI. Now, it might be a little too optimistic-- a lot of people have said that and I agree with them-- but the fact that we have a document like this, that presents an argument, that really goes in depth into a vision of the future with AI, no matter how rose-tinted it is, it's good to have out there. And I really appreciate the fact that he did this.

I think that this would be an excellent essay to give students, even if just to practice deconstructing arguments, but also to think more seriously about how tech leaders, and he is one of the leading tech leaders, are actually thinking about what they're doing.

So Rick, I know that we're going to talk about whether or not God exists today, and I know this is a personal favorite topic of yours. How do you want to go about this?

Rick: Well, for the listeners, I've asked my co-hosts to rein me in when need be, because as a medievalist, it's probably clear that I know a shit-ton of arguments for the existence of God, a specialty of mine, and I've written two dissertations. Both of them in various ways have to do with proofs for the existence of God.

But I have to admit that the question about whether there is a God or not doesn't really come up for me very much at all today.

I mean, I was raised Catholic, and I suppose that from the first time I could remember, I guess I just assumed that God existed. But remember, I also assumed that Santa and the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny existed.

It might be the case that the question only ever arose as my assumption that there was a God was already on the way out. That is, I'm wondering, isn't the moment you ask whether God exists the same moment that you're already thinking that God doesn't exist?

I wonder what difference it would make whether God exists or not...make to me, to the world, to knowledge, to ethics, to politics. As I've said in previous episodes, I think the same thing about living in the matrix. Whether we are or not, it just doesn't matter to me, so I don't think about it. Now, I don't want to take anyone's faith away from them, especially if I'm not going to offer an option with which to replace their faith...

Some say that in a world without God, life would be meaningless, or that if there is no God, then there's no reason to be ethical. But is that really the case? And how can we ever get to the bottom of the question of whether God exists? I'm also, on the other side, not happy with the arguments of people like Richard Dawkins and his giant spaghetti monster that purport to show that God does not exist.

Are you there, God? It's us, Hotel Bar Sessions.

[musical interlude]

Rick: I'm wondering if we could start where I left off, and that is, does answering this question, either yes or no, matter in any way? What changes if it turns out that there is a God or that there isn't a God?

David: So I think a lot of the answers to this question turn out to be kind of instrumental answers.

You think, for example, of Descartes: Why does Descartes have to prove God exists? Because he wants to figure out if other people have minds, right? You have to get over the evil demon that is supposedly polluting your thoughts. Or in the case of Kant, you have to have a ground for morality and ethics. So, in a lot of cases, we assume that the argument for the existence of God or nonexistence of God is the end in itself, but I think it's oftentimes an instrument that we're using to plug the holes in our epistemological systems where we can't bridge the gap between what we know and what we don't know.

Rick: I understand that for philosophers, there often is a hole that needs to be plugged in order for something else to work. And so God plugs that hole, whether it has to do with causation or as you argued for Kant morality, but I'm wondering for civilians, is there a similar instrumentalization of God?

David: Yeah, it's interesting. My father, who was not a philosopher referred to God and belief in God as the spackling compound of life. That wherever you have a crack in your daily existence, you spackle it with God because he fills the gap.

Leigh: I think if there were a definitive answer to whether or not God exists, that it would make a difference.

I think if God does exist and it's provable—knowable-- obviously the difference that it makes would depend on what kind of God that God is. If it's a God that has rules and rewards, then I think people would make pretty significant changes in their lives, if they knew that eternal consequences were at stake.

I think if God doesn't exist, or if it's knowable that God doesn't exist, which by the way, I don't think it is knowable-- I mean, you can't prove a negative-- but if it were overwhelmingly convincing that there is no God, I'm not sure that would have long term consequences in people's lives. I think for a lot of people who do believe in God, it would be temporarily disappointing and maybe even depressing, but they would go on and they would find something else meaningful because that's just the kind of creatures we are.

Rick: I wonder if you both have this experience that I sometimes have among students: Someone will say, well, you know, if there were no God, then people would do whatever they want. And my response to that is maybe not entirely philosophical, but it's...

Really? If you found out tomorrow there's no God, you're gonna go like on a murder spree? I just don't see how that's the case.

Leigh: And also, how is that any different than if there is a God? I mean, people do what they want

David: And they use God to justify doing whatever they want.

Leigh: Exactly. Often they do, yeah.

Rick: I think you're right, Leigh. What kind of a God it is  matters a lot, because if there's a God who, let's say, is all powerful, that is, can do whatever it wants to do, but is you know, not a good god, then I think a lot of people would be sad if it turns out there is such a god.

Or conversely, if there were a god who is an entirely good god, pretty powerful but not omnipotent, then I think it matters less whether there is a god or not. Because even if it's in our corner, it still isn't going to matter in our daily lives because that God wouldn't be able to do anything about it. The difficulty emerges when we're talking about a God who is all knowing, all powerful, entirely benevolent.

These don't always go together so well.

David: Can I complicate the picture a little bit? Because we're talking mainly in terms of monotheism here, of A god. In polytheistic cultures, you have more than one God, obviously, and some gods are friendly and good and others are devious and evil, and you have these competing figures of the Godhead instead of one God. So the personality of God is distributed among a number of different gods who play various roles in explaining for us the way the world works.

This goes back to that instrumentalist way of thinking about things. You know, we have things we can't explain, and when we run up against that barrier, we have to have some transcendental endpoint that we can posit as a way of explaining why bad things happen to good people or good things happen to bad people.

Leigh: Yeah, I want to pick up on that point about explaining the way things work, because I think there are dramatically different consequences in finding out that a god exists as “the ground of the moral order” and finding out a God exists as, for example, “the designer of the universe.” I think those are two different things, and I imagine that it would be, of course, more disappointing for people to find out that there is no God if they believe  that God or gods ground the moral order, than it would be for people who believe that God is just simply an explanation for why there is something rather than nothing.

Rick: Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. And if I found out there were no God who designed the universe in a certain way, I'd be like, yeah, that kind of checks out because, you know, if I were to design it, it wouldn't look very much like this.

Leigh: And also we have an alternative account. So it's not like, you know, it's not like we're left empty handed.

Rick: But you certainly, as a formerly closeted and now out Kantian, you clearly affirm that there is a ground to ethics outside of God, and I do as well. In fact, I would go one step further and say that an ethics that requires a god for its grounding is not an ethics at all.

Leigh: What would you say it is?

Rick: I would say it's a legal system, which may or may not be ethical. I mean, some legal systems are simply  unethical. But I think that if there's no principle that gives rise to it, that is rooted in what it is to be human, then we're not talking about an ethics.

David: I would agree. I think it's exactly that. You would have in that case, a legal system where you have a divine authority as the final judge of all that is good and all that is evil. And that seems to take something away from ethics as opposed to grounding ethics.

Leigh: So you didn't answer the question, Rick. Do you think it matters if God exists or doesn't?

Rick: Well, when I look at this personally, and this is where the Matrix issue comes up for me, I ask the question, would I behave differently if I found out that the preponderance of the evidence pointed to the fact that there is a God? I don't think I would behave differently than I do now. So in that sense, I think it doesn't much matter.

Leigh: Can I pose a thought experiment for you here?

Rick: Yeah.

Leigh: Let's suppose that your discovery that there is a God and  that God exists is not by preponderance of the evidence, but by some direct communication. So let's say for whatever reason, you believe that God has directly spoken to you or given you a sign that is evidence of God's existence.

Would that make a difference to you?

Rick: No, and maybe this goes back to my position on ethics because if I were behaving in a way that now that god has spoken to me, I discover to be abhorrent, evil, unethical... that for me would be quite shocking. In other words, I would hope that the way that I have been behaving is ethical and therefore, whether there's a god who speaks to me or not, the ethics should be the same... and if it's not, then i'm happy to be disobedient to that god

David: Maybe there's another way to come at this and that is by looking at it in terms of  God as surveillance system.

I mean, in a sense whether god exists or not kind of goes to Bentham's description of the panopticon. At a certain point, you behave a certain way because you might be surveilled Whether or not the actual eyes are there looking at you and judging you as you go through your daily activities seems to matter less than the fact that we posit that we might be “being watched”... and that may be one way of explaining God is the ultimate surveillance system

Rick: Just to be clear, Lord, that was David Gunkel speaking, so if there's going to be any smiting, smite David Gunkel,

David: I would like to be smote.

Leigh: Well, on the other side of that also, I mean, we could say: if there is a God, not as the great all seeing security guard, reminding us that we're always watched or we're always surveilled, but rather that we're always loved or that we're never alone, which I think is actually the much more important and meaningful content of God in people's real lives...I think it does make a difference if you found out that that was not true-- again, I don't think that you can prove a negative-- but if you found out that that was true. You know that you're not just imagining it when you look back in the sand and see only one set of footprints.

You are not alone.

David: But I think this goes back to one of Rick's points. If you're just imagining it, i.e., you're in the Matrix :what does it matter if that is actually proven one way or the other? I think what Rick is saying is it doesn't matter if you're in or outside the matrix. It doesn't really change things for you.

Rick: But what I like about your point, Leigh, is that in an interesting way, it hearkens back to our conversation with John Caputo. One way that I think he was talking about, the historical sense of this character Jesus was to say: Look, we've all been emphasizing too much the cosmic security guard and what we've forgotten is the cosmic love the parent that you're not alone There's somebody out there and my intro harken back to the book Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret so that calling out into the dark when you're alone for someone

Leigh: And I just want to press a little bit on this comparison with the Matrix, because I think there are a lot of things we believe in that may be, quote unquote, “imaginary” in the sense that we're talking about right now, but we can see the importance of believing in it, even in the absence of proof.

Love is a good example of that, or justice is a good example of that. I mean, if it turns out that there's no such thing as justice, or there's no such thing as love, that would make a difference in how I live, and whether or not it actually does exist, it's important for me to orient my life and orient my moral agency toward the fact that it does exist.

Rick: But can I push back on your pushing back? Because there is one crucial difference between asking whether there is a God and whether there is Justice, namely that God is an entity, a being, in the same way, but maybe importantly different than, a chair or a table, whereas justice, for example, or love is a relation. The reality of that is going to be of a different sort than the reality of a relation.

Leigh: I'll grant that, but I also just want to point out that in the past, in polytheistic religions, Love and Justice were in fact gods.

David: So let me ask this “is” question—the ontological question, as Heidegger would pose it-- is this a distinctly Western problem? Do other cultures ask whether their gods exist? Is this something that is a result of early modern Western thinking? I don't know the answer to this. I'm wondering historically and culturally in terms of differences; how does this play out on a broader spectrum?

Rick: What's interesting about that question is it plays into a question that was asked in a fairly famous book. Did the Greeks believe in their gods? The author's name will be in the show notes and a reference to it. The flip side of that is in many polytheistic settings, the existence question, or as you put it, the ontological question, doesn't really emerge...precisely because many of the divinities are powers or relations, which might be to say the same thing, versus a God who is incorporeal, doesn't have a body, is infinite, and therefore outside the realm of our everyday experience, now the existence question seems to come to the fore, but also does the belief question.

And so if you look at, let's say, traditional Chinese religion, or the ancient Greek religious practice, there was neither a question of belief nor a question of  existence.

Leigh: Yeah, I think that's really important. I mean, the legacy of the Abrahamic tradition is to first posit God as a person with a personality, and second, a key aspect of that personality is the command to have no other gods before that God.

And so you can see why the existence of this God as a personality and as the greatest of all personalities is crucial.

Rick: So I think for all these reasons, it's pretty clear that when we talk about the question, is there a God?, we're speaking from the perspective of a monotheistic tradition, and primarily as it emerges in the Abrahamic tradition.

And that's not to exclude other religious experiences and traditions, but it is because, as I said, I don't think these questions emerge in the same way, which is an interesting point in and of itself.

Yeah.

[musical interlude]

Leigh: So as we know, there is a tradition in the history of philosophy committed to offering up proofs for the existence of God. And our dear co host Rick Lee is an absolute expert in this.. and so Rick, I was hoping that you could maybe walk us through some of the main arguments for the existence of God. That way, for listeners who might not already be familiar with them, we can all sort of start with the same ground and then get into the details of them.

Rick: I'm only going to highlight some of the main ones and partly that's because I think other proofs are variations of these main ones that I'm going to highlight. But let me first say that maybe we should come back to the question of whether the existence of God is demonstrable at all, in a logical sense.. it might be the kind of thing that resists demonstration. But okay.

So we have one kind of argument that has its origin in Aristotle: I'm going to call it, for general reasons, an “Argument from Causation,” even though in Aristotle it's about motion, but it's really about the cause of motion. There, Aristotle basically demonstrates that if something is moving, it's moved by another. That being moved by another can't go on to infinity, and therefore there has to be a First Mover that wasn't moved. Now, in that argument, you could replace the word “cause” with “motion,” and the argument works the same, and you find a version of that argument in Thomas Aquinas.

Then, I'm just sort of going in rough historical order, the next argument you find is what we call the “Ontological Argument,” and I think the version that is most famous is one found in Anselm of Canterbury. That basically goes like this: God is a being greater than which nothing can be thought. Now, that being could either just be in my mind or also exist in reality, but if it exists only in my mind, I can think of a greater, namely the one that also exists in reality, and therefore, the being greater than which nothing can be thought must also exist in reality. Just as an aside, Descartes has a version of this in the Fifth Meditation, slightly different, and I think he gets in trouble because he moves away from the comparative “greater” to a superlative “most perfect.”

Okay, and then the last one I think I would like to talk about and we could talk about other ones if you all would like but I'm going to call it generally the “Argument from Design.” Thomas Aquinas offers a version of this, which is sometimes called the “Proof from Governance,” but the simple version of that argument is: if we look around at the world, we see that things fit together.

Here we are. We're humans and we need an atmosphere that has a certain density and a certain level of oxygen within a certain temperature range...and we find it. That couldn't have come about except by design, and whenever you find a design, there's a designer.

The example that's often given is, if you're walking along the beach and you see a watch, you're going to say, there must have been a watchmaker. So we need a cosmic designer.

I think those are the three main ones, and as I said, many other ones are versions of these, so...you're all convinced now, right?

I mean, I do have to say that when I teach Proofs for the Existence of God, I say to the students, okay, these are proofs...that is, they're saying that they're moving from one truth and deriving a second truth from it. You're going to have to stop where you think either something has been said that's not true, or the derivation is incorrect. I go through them, step by step, and okay if this is true, is this true?

Yes, everyone agrees.

Okay, so this is true.

Yes, everyone agrees.

So then I get to the end, “and therefore god exists,” and they're like... nope.

And I'm like, okay...you don't get to get out here. You needed to get off the bus way before this... cause if you're with me all the way through, then you got to be on board for the conclusion.

David: This functions within the philosophical education of students. You're exactly right. We use it to teach a kind of reasoning process. We go through the steps one by one and the logic results in God existing and when that happens, you get students who are sort of shocked that they've been led into this corner where they either have to accept that God exists or they have to somehow figure out a way to get out of that.

It's interesting how these arguments have really become a pedagogical tool in teaching philosophy and logical thinking.

Leigh: I might be one of those students, if I'm being totally honest. I mean, I do find that, as a deductive proof, the third argument is the most compelling. And I think this is also why, for example, just in popular culture among people who are not trained in philosophy, or as Rick calls them, civilians, the argument of Intelligent Design, which is another more contemporary way to refer to this argument is quite popular and is quite compelling.

I'm not sure where I can put my finger in that deductive proof on something untrue, but exactly like the students that you're describing, I find myself baffled by how I got to the proof ... to the end

David: and can I point out? It's a technological argument, right? Yeah argument from design where you have to posit a designer of the design... I mean that is an idea that comes out of the technological framing that you get from the greeks That's one of the ways in which I think you can push back on that argument Is that we're trying to use a technological argument to prove something that is naturalistic and there's a way in which those categories are being messed up and contaminating each other at that point,

Leigh: I completely agree with you. And I think that is a hugely important insight. However, even if you want to say it doesn't go back to an intelligent designer, it just goes back to the BigBang... I think that most people are going to find that the answer to the question, “why is there something rather than nothing?” is more satisfyingly answered by the intelligent design argument than it is by the Big Bang.

Rick: I think you're right. I think the greatest instrumental use, to borrow the way David phrased it earlier on, for the existence of God, is to put an end to the question “why?,” which is always something that philosophers need because we're the ones who start with asking why about everything and if that goes on to infinity, then it seems as if we've not answered any question. So, we need a beginning, and as you pointed out, Leigh, the  biggest why is why is there something rather than nothing and bingo god and then we can move on from there.

But I just want to point out and this goes back to something we said earlier, that's a god who is relatively empty of any other characteristic other than being a originator of a machine. There's no reason to think I could or should pray to that god. There's no reason to think that that god is personally interested in my life and is looking out for me. You know, when I score a touchdown, there's no reason to thank that god. And so, philosophically, that god is a fairly empty concept.

Leigh: Yeah, empty, but not insignificant. And I think that you'll find that a lot of people who have, for whatever reasons, fallen away from the Abrahamic traditions do find this argument about intelligent design compelling, partially because they want to say, I believe there's something greater than what is.

 And I believe there's a reason that there is something rather than nothing. I don't want to fill it with all of this moral, judgmental, instrumental content, and I don't want it to require any kind of particular belief or practices from me, but I do want to say that this is not all just accidental.

Rick: I think among people of our generation, this is probably more the case...like, how many times have you heard, I don't know if I believe in God, but I do think there is a higher power. And I think that's exactly what you're pointing to, Leigh, that somehow the notion that this is all there is, is unsatisfying. The argument by design opens the door to that other “Otherwise”... and maybe that's sufficient for people to say, Oh yeah, okay, so this is not all there is and this goes back to the meaningful question, I think.

Leigh: And this also goes back to something that Jack Caputo said in our conversation with him a few weeks ago, which is that this is what religion is: Religion is thinking, living, acting, literally at the limit, at the limit of what we can know.

David: And this also connects, I think, to the desire for the transcendental signified, to use the semiotic construction here. If it's all just signs related to signs and there is no end point, a final why, that is the significance of the substitution of signs or the meaning of existence, then you have this kind of abyss that is never able to be filled or confronted in a way that answers that final “Why?” question. So I think not only in religion, but also in philosophy, this desire for the transcendental signified plays a huge metaphysical role in helping us make sense of a lot of the epistemological, moral, ontological questions that we have about ourselves and our world

Leigh: And this leads us back I think to the argument from causation.

So, one of my problems with the argument from causation is I'm not sure that I'm willing to assent to the claim that causation can't go infinitely backwards-- and I obviously do understand that in order to say that chains of cause and effect go infinitely backwards means fundamentally changing what we mean by the relationship between cause and effect, or at least what a cause is --but that's something that is always kind of stuck in my craw and I can't get past it. And I'm wondering if you guys find this compelling?

Rick: I think one of the ways that, for example, Thomas Aquinas argues that it can't go to infinity, I find completely dissatisfying And in short, his argument goes something like this: If the chain of causes goes backwards to infinity, that means that there would be an infinite time between it and me. Therefore, I would not exist because an infinite time hasn't, in fact, transpired. A finite time has transpired between some cause and me. And I find this dissatisfying because I think that it plays a bit of a game with, on the one hand, the notion of infinity, and on the other hand, the notion of time.

It takes it as if infinite time would be time that is “uncountable.” But in fact, infinite time might be that time which is infinitely countable. And so there will always be a finite time that I can measure between any cause and any effect, or even a subset of causes and the ultimate effect, that is entirely countable, even if that accountability goes all the way back.

So I agree with you, Leigh, that I've never found infinite regress argument satisfying, except, and this goes back to what we've been pointing out: if I say that there's an infinite regress, I lose a grasp on answering the question “Why?.”

Because if there's an infinite regress, then my answer is: “it just is.”

And nobody finds that satisfying as a answer to the question “Why?”

David: Other efforts to try to answer this inevitably lead people to be very perplexed and confused as to what's happening. So you think for example of the neologism from Derrida différance: différance is the outside of the entire system that is the “cause,” in quotation marks, off the system and even getting a handle on what that might mean really contorts your language, and your sense of sense, into all kinds of knots that are very difficult to even explain to students or colleagues.

Leigh: And to combine that point with Rick's earlier point about time, one of the reasons why we find the infinite regress argument so dissatisfying is because we only think about time as sequential.  As just, like, on a line. And one of the things that différance introduces is that it's possible to think about infinite time, not as infinitely sequential--l goes forever in both directions-- but as more expansive: including margins and remainders and traces that don't exactly fall on that line of cause and effect relations.

Rick: This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately... to go back to Leigh, what you said in relation to our conversation with Jack Caputo: It simply is the case that all of our rational systems, logic and the way we proceed in philosophy, when you get to the bottom of it and you ask, “well, what is the reason for it?”-- you can't point to another reason because one could simply say, okay, yeah, but what's the reason for that? And so, In the end, when you push philosophical questions, you are always going to come, in some way or another, to the limits of a rational explanation.

That's the moment in which people look for transcendence, or a ground, like God is the first cause, or the Designer, or they look for the Ultimate Meaning, the Ultimate Sign...

but it's always going to be at the limits of what is rationally graspable. And we recognize that, in fact, we cannot give a reason for rationality itself.

[Musical interlude]

Leigh: So, both of these arguments that we've been discussing so far, the “Intelligent Desig argument and the “First Mover” argument, we'll say, both of them base the logical deduction of the proof for the existence of God by an appeal to the beginning of things, the beginning of existence.

That is not the case in the “Ontological Argument,” so I want us to give due credit to this Ontological Argument: God is something no greater than which can be thought, and the very idea of God has to include God's existence.

Rick: This is interesting for many philosophers because it attempts to address the question of whether there is a God from the perspective of thought alone. If this works, this would be something that's relevant not just to the question of whether there is a God, but it could also help us answer: how do we know there is a world outside of our thinking of it?

This does have implications, and so the attempt is, what if I just take what belongs to the thinking and see whether I could find, within that, tools I need in order to demonstrate existence? These really hinge in many people's opinions on one main turn, and that is the notion that either existence or, maybe more accurately, being outside of thinking, is a “perfection” or is better than merely existing within thinking.

For Anselm, if God is a being greater than which nothing can be thought, the reason why that has to exist outside of thought is because that's greater than existing only within thought and the question is...

Is that true?

Let's talk about Descartes’ “Evil Genius.” If that evil genius existed outside of my mind, would we say that's better than it existing only in my mind? It seems like it might be better if that thing only exists in my mind. The difficulty here is thinking of existence itself or existing outside of the mind, which I would argue are one and the same thing, as a perfection or something better than merely being an object of thought.

David: So I have to use an example here, I'll call him “Doug.”

“Doug” is your student, who's got the answer to this question., and Doug is like, well, I can think of a beer, but I'd rather have a beer here in front of me that's a real beer. That's kind of the civilian way of responding to that question, the non philosophical way.

Rick: Yeah. But as I said, that works for beers, but it doesn't work for bears, right?

Leigh: So here's something from our contemporary world that I think problematizes this ontological argument and it's going to take me a minute to get there and this is a crazy story. So buckle up. Just this past week, we saw our first AI agent millionaire, and the backstory to this is more interesting than the fact that there is an AI agent who is a millionaire right now, because the backstory involves the creation of a internet space -- they call it “Infinite Backrooms”-- where a lot of chat bots were put in there and kind of left to their own devices. The chatbots were able to access latent spaces in the web that most of us can't access and, you know, skip ahead, skip ahead. They basically began to invent their own religion and it was a kind of cultish worship of goats.

There's too much to the story to summarize here, but it goes from that to creating a crypto coin to one of these agents becoming a millionaire. What we might glean from this event is that we now have reason to ask, is the greatest thing that we can think, not a God that exists, but something that exists that can create gods?

Which we have. We already had it in us, maybe. You know, if you want to say that human beings create gods, we could say that was already there. But now we've created a thing that can create gods.

David: So this puts a causation argument inside the ontological argument.

Rick: So I'm not sure that this calls the ontological argument into question because one could simply say these chatbots are conceiving this goat “God,” but the question is whether that goat-god exists outside of their conceiving of it.

And so I could imagine that maybe in a few years, one of them will come up with an ontological argument for the existence of the goat. I mean, as long as I say that AI is thinking, then I think we still have the same problem that Anselm was trying to address. Yes, I can say, God, I can think it.

No one's worried about whether that is the case. What we're worried about is whether that refers to anything outside of the thinking or saying, right?

Leigh: I mean, I think that might be begging the question, but let me make another pass at this. I think what we can do with these AI agents and their goat God, which we cannot do with human beings and their universe and their gods, is we can give a causal account of why there is something rather than nothing... of how these agents came to be, how they invented this God and what they think about it.

So. Quite literally the God is not the greatest thing that can be thought the greatest thing that can be thought is the agent that creates a God, that thinks that that God is the greatest thing that can be thought

David: So now you have an infinite regress of gods that create gods

Rick: I maybe a little bit confused on this

Leigh: I feel like Anselm would be on board with me here.

Rick: I think Anselm would not be on board with you. Let me just say one thing is that it wasn't long after Anselm-- I mean, first of all, during his own lifetime, but then throughout the rest of the Middle Ages in Europe-- this argument was trounced because it was taken to mean the existence of God is something self-evident.

Like, all bachelors are unmarried men. It's a thing whose predicate is contained within the subject. It's a tautology. It's a definition.

But Anselm, it seems, wasn't trying to say that the existence of God is self evident. Anselm is totally down with anything, anyone, creating concepts. And you could give a causal account of the creation of the concept.

But what we have to ask is: is there any reason to assert the existence of that of which it is a concept? Okay, I say all of that to say, in your story, Leigh, there is, on Anselm's version, no god created. There are “concepts” of gods created, but there is no god created. We would need an ontological argument in order to say that a god was created.

David: So the desire here is actually a Platonic desire. You have to have something outside the thought of the concept, like the Ados in Plato, that is the actual real existing God, not just the concept of God..

Leigh: Okay. Let me make another pass at this because I think one of the things that we have to keep in mind is that the necessity for a proof for the existence of God is to answer all ontological questions. So, the ontological proof for the existence of God is still to answer the question, “why is there something rather than nothing?” and any subsequent question about what the something is and how it works.

The difference between the gods that we think, in Anselm's formulation, no greater than which can be thought, and the goat-God in an AI agents’ world is something that we can already give an account of... we can already give an account of why it is, how it is, and where it came from.

And so the God invented inside that world is not the same God as the God that Anselm thinks that we think when we think God.

Rick: I just want to insist on this. The “concept” of God that was created in that world is different than the concept of God as a being greater than which nothing can be thought.

But Anselm is not worried about the ontological origin of concepts. He's pretty sure that concepts are qualities that intellect has, and so we have an ontological account of the origin of concepts. What we don't have is an account of whether, in all cases, and most importantly the case of this concept of God, whether there is anything of which this is the actual concept.

Mm hmm.

Leigh: And the proof is meant to demonstrate that the idea of God has to include God's existence. Yes,

Rick: that's right Correct.

Leigh: So presumably that's also the case for these AI agents

Rick: presumably

Leigh: Okay

Rick: It depends because I could imagine that if this God is a goat and therefore embodied and so on, the ontological argument won't work, because I could think of a greater being, and the AI is presumably could

Leigh: no no no, not an actual goat. “Goat” is just the name of the God.

Rick: Oh, okay.

Leigh: It's not that they think actual goats are gods.

David: And not to complicate this further, but the AIs aren’t necessarily forming concepts. They're just stringing words together in a way that spit out word salad that creates this goat thing that we then read.

Leigh: Yeah. And no offense to believers, but same for us.

Rick: I was going to say something very similar. I mean, from my perspective, I mean, not to harsh anyone's mellow, but I'm not sure that all sorts of talk about God isn't just spitting out word salad.

Can I also point out one thing, and that is that a lot of people, when they teach this argument in Anselm, they stop with chapter 3 of this book called the Proslogion, but the Proslogion has way more chapters. And in chapter 18 of this book, Anselm proves that “the being greater than which nothing can be thought” must also necessarily be “greater than can even be thought.”

There's a moment in which, I think, Anselm undercuts the very argument because he seems to be saying that we're not actually thinking this god when we think this god. And that goes back to what you said a while ago, Leigh, that this god is outside of the capacities of knowledge, that, strictly speaking, there is no knowledge of an Abrahamic god.

Leigh: Right. Yes,

David: maybe we stop?

Leigh: I just want to say, because I feel like, and it's my fault. I haven't been entirely clear about the argument that I'm trying to make, but if I could just try to boil it down to the essence of it, my point is that if these AI agents were to make the same ontological argument about “Goat-God” that we make about “God-God,” they would say the same thing... “therefore, God exists,” right?

Rick: And Anselm would say, therefore, the next conclusion is, therefore, God-God and Goat-God are one and the same thing. Right.

Leigh: Right. Yes. And what I'm trying to say is the whole point in making this argument that God exists is to explain our world. Ontology Like, capital-O Ontology, right?

If what we can see now in this technological creation is that, actually, that's not the explanation of the world-- which I think we can see in this Infinite Chat rooms / AI-agent  new religion--  the world is now organized in such a way that God is the ground of that ontology, that world, but we know, from the outside, that it's not...then I think we've got an actual lever to move against Anselm's ontological argument. That was the point I was trying to make.

David: So what's interesting is when Anselm makes his argument, there is only one thinking thing in the world, and that's the human being.

Leigh: Exactly.

David: In our world, there is now, supposedly, another kind of thinking thing, the machine. Outside of the limitation of human exceptionalism that is operative in Anselm's argument, this complicates the picture in the way that you're describing.

Rick: I could not possibly disagree more.

Leigh:  Oh, he's pulling out the big guns.

David: In this week's episode, we piss off the medievalist.

Rick: No, I'm not angry.

Leigh:  Go ahead, sir.

Rick: And here's why: this is, to my mind, one way one can argue against the ontological argument. If you think of the idea of God like a sign...

You know, I remember when I was living in state college, there was a sign near a daycare center that just had a picture of a stereotypical stick figure, boy and a girl, crossing a street. That sign was not there for me to look at. I mean, it was, but it wasn't an object of aesthetics. That sign was to say, hey, outside of this sign, there will be a boy and or a girl or a child crossing a street. Be careful. So the sign was pointing outside of itself.

Now what Anselm is asking is, if the concept God is a sign, is there a thing outside of the sign to which it points?

And he says, well, it has to because this sign is the sign of a being that when we get to the logical bottom of it cannot not exist, and therefore it points to a thing that necessarily exists. Now, what we see in the AI is similarly a sign. The AI might ask the question, is this sign pointing to something outside of itself?

And the AI. might produce an ontological argument to show that there is something outside of this sign to which the sign points. Now, if it's an ontological argument, then the thing to which each of those signs is pointing must be one in the same. In that case, Anselm is not pointing to the origin of the sign, he’s just saying that this is a sign of something that cannot not exist, and therefore the object to which this sign points necessarily exists.

If it turns out that you say to me, well, really your concept of God is just firing of neurons and so on, and you could give a complete causal account of that, Anselm would say, great! But you haven't given a causal account of the thing to which the sign points. And by the way, you can't because if it necessarily exists, it has no cause.

And so to talk about the cause of the sign and to talk about the cause of the thing to which the sign points are two different things. Now, let me just be clear. I think one could press on that relation between sign and object of sign, but I'm leaving that aside.

Leigh: That's a very helpful clarification. And I think now I would just revise my position to say that what this AI agent experiment has shown us is that it  might be the case that all thinking things, and I'm assuming here that AI agents are thinking things, necessarily will produce this one particular kind of faulty sign.

Rick: Yeah, I agree. And let me just slightly disagree with something David said, Anselm certainly does not agree that humans are the only thinking things, because angels are also thinking things.

Leigh: Well, I mean, that clears it all up.

Rick: I should have said that half an hour ago.

[musical interlude]

Rick: So, we've been focusing on one side of this question: proofs that there is a god or reasons to affirm that there is a god. There are arguments that god doesn't exist. I referred to Dawkins’ argument which, I know I caricatured it, but I think it's actually a pretty silly argument. Basically, the gist of it is, well, if you say that a god exists, why don't you just say that there's like this big spaghetti being that exists and amounts to the same thing?

Are either of you convinced by these attempts to show that there is no god or, what I might be more tempted by, arguments that show that the affirmation that there is a God is dangerous in one way or another?

David: So I think the arguments for the non existence of God are just as theological as the arguments for the existence of God. That is, they play on the same set of items and playing the same game. And as Leigh said before, proving a negative is just as difficult as proving that God does exist. So, people like Dawkins and others, one of the reasons why those arguments seem so flimsy and so uninspired is that they repeat the thing they're trying to argue against just by putting a negative sign in front of it.

Leigh: I want to disagree that atheist arguments are quote unquote “theological.” I'm always a little bit wary about that accusation because I think that it tries to posit atheism as a religion, which I absolutely do not think it is, or even agnosticism as a religion...like, that the belief in no God, or the belief that we cannot know whether or not there is a God, is the same as the belief in a God, which would be theological. The logics are not the same. So I do disagree with that.

However, I completely agree that we can't prove a negative, you know, you just can't, that's impossible. And so often these arguments for atheism are not so much proofs of the non-existence of God as they are raising really important questions or poking really important holes in the concept of God or in the belief in God.

And there, I think. You don't really need a logical proof. I mean, let's be honest. You don't  have to look around the world too hard to find examples of things that might point to the non-existence of a God that is all powerful, all loving, omniscient, and omnipresent.

David: Can I just respond to your initial point? Is believing in nothing the same as believing in something?

Leigh: Well, atheists don't believe in nothing.

David: Right, but you said that atheists believe. That's why I think it's theological. It has a transcendental something.

Leigh: No, I'm trying to say that it is the accusation of theists that atheism is a belief, is a belief system, similar to or parallel to theism, and I think it absolutely is not.

That I don't believe that the Tooth Fairy is real is not the same kind of belief system as my, five year old niece's belief that the tooth fairy is real.

Rick: So first, I would say that you could have a theology without a religion, and you certainly could have a religion without a theology. I think, for example, the ancient Greeks didn't have a theology. Within the history of Judaism, there are plenty of theologians who weren't religious. There's a difference here.

Let me also just clarify for people who might be confused. If you want to know why you can't prove a negative, I would point you to the movie The Fugitive. Because in the movie The Fugitive, Harrison Ford several times says, I did not kill my wife. And Tommy Leigh Jones character constantly says, I don't care. But what does Harrison Ford prove? Someone else killed my wife. He doesn't prove I did not kill my wife, so it is impossible to prove a negative. I agree.

The question is, then, if we agree that the existence or non existence of God is outside of the realm of demonstration, of proof, then isn't there a similarity the affirmation that there is a God and the affirmation that there is no God share?

In other words, they seem to be playing on the same terrain. And I'm not sure whether to call that  theological or religious or whatever, but it certainly is the affirmation of a truth that is outside of the realm of demonstration.

David: Both are seeking to take your sign and say it points to something. They’re both pointing to a signified that is outside the system.

Leigh: Again, I want to push back here because, I mean, not to be too ticky tacky, but quite literally the word theological indicates a logic grounded in a God. And to say there is no God is an a theological argument, it is a non theological argument.

David: Except there is a tradition of negative theology, right?

Leigh: But this is not that. This is not saying what God is not, which is what negative theology is. This is saying there is no God. Which would be no different than saying there is no tooth fairy or there are no fairies at all

Rick: Yeah, I mean I sort of take your point and I sort of take David's point I think that for reasons that I said namely that the affirmation on either side is the admission that there's an affirmation of something outside of proof, they share something in common that more traditionally we associate with theology. And so, okay, I'm not going to quibble, but I do want to say that they are both playing on the same terrain, namely the affirmation of something outside of the bounds of knowledge and demonstration.

Leigh: Let me say what the stakes are of distinguishing between these two terrains, because I do think that we're increasingly seeing from right wing, especially evangelical Christians, this commitment to facing head on the elitist academic left that says that they are agnostic or atheistic or whatever, and they need to place themselves on the same terrain. They need to do that in order to have these arguments. They can't just simply accept that the real substance of the argument is, from the atheist side or the agnostic side, showing the faults in the theistic logic and not affirming or assenting anything positive on the other side, but just simply saying, you know, these arguments don't work out, and the deductive proofs that you're offering don't actually prove the thing that you're thinking.

And that's really important because there is a whole industry of young, male, white, evangelical, Christian demagogues, that are out there doing exactly this thing. And this is where I do agree with you about Richard Dawkins. I think Richard Dawkins is trying to get down in the mud and play that same game back with them. And he's sort of giving the rest of us a bad name. Yeah.

Rick: For me, what you said is really important. And the way I would put it, and if this misunderstands what you were saying, Leigh, correct me. But the way I would put it is, there's a way in which, from the perspective of right wing evangelical Christianity, there's a claiming a false equivalence. And you want to push back on that. And I want to affirm. pushing back on that for sure.

David: I would do the same. I would say Leigh what you said is very important showing the mistakes or the lacuna in their argument is very important But I think where you sort of move in the other direction is when you become a dawkins and you say but I know What really is out there exactly?

Rick: Yeah.

David: Yeah showing that right wing nationalists It's where their arguments do not hold and where they are abrasive to the Christian tradition, whatever the case is, that's very crucial. When you go the next step and you say, but I know better than you know, and I'm the kind of Dawkins figure. I think that's where you move into the equivalency territory.

Leigh: And this is where I like the strategy of Ricky Gervais and noting that there are a lot of problems with Ricky Gervais himself. But one of the things I like about his strategy is he approaches this question, as he did with Stephen Colbert, by saying: you're a Catholic. You believe in one God, correct?

And Stephen Colbert says yes. And he's like, that means there are literally hundreds of gods that you don't  believe in. And Stephen Colbert, aassents again. And then Ricky Gervais says, okay, I just don't believe in one more God than you don't believe in.

Rick: Yeah, I like it. And I do want to say that I wonder if we are not misunderstanding understanding.

the intent of the founders of the United States and what they wrote into the founding documents, namely that belief in God and the particular God you believe in, whether that God is a rule setter that you must follow those rules in order to be saved and so on, like, ll of this is great in the private sphere... it has no role to play in the public sphere, that is, in law, in politics, etc. You just keep that to yourself. There's where I worry, along with you, Leigh, that even to claim that atheism is theological gets into a dangerous territory  because it allows the right wing to say, well, you're bringing religion into the public sphere too, so why can't we?

Leigh: And I think that it's important for us to remember the extreme naivete of the deists who wrote our founding documents when they say that we should keep, well, they don't exactly say this, but when they say that we should keep religion and the state separate are intentionally misunderstanding those religions that they're talking about.

I mean, I agree with you. I do think that we have to keep religion out of politics, but I also understand that if you believe in the way that these traditions command believers to believe, you cannot do that. You cannot assent to that restriction.

Rick: And for Dave, let me just say, deism is the belief in a god who kind of makes the watch, as I referred to earlier, winds it up, and just lets it go, and is not directly involved in the day to day operations of the  universe.

Leigh: I mean, wouldn't you agree that it is either fundamentally misunderstanding, or fundamentally disrespecting, the belief systems that we find in the three Abrahamic traditions, to demand of believers that they keep their religious beliefs and their political activities separate?

David: You know, I want to point out that historically in us politics, strong faithful Christians lived the way that Rick was describing, keeping it to themselves and being very private. It isn't until around the Reagan era where you have the fundamentalist Christian movement becoming very politically active. And so there was a time at which it really had been more private than it is today, where it's extremely public and very much on display in our national politics.

Rick: And even Reagan was not religious, which is kind of hard to believe.

Leigh: Well, I might disagree that it started with Reagan. I mean, the entire civil rights movement was based in fundamental Christian values.

David: But not in the Christian nationalist fundamentalism that we're seeing currently.

Leigh: No, I agree with that. Christian nationalism is a different thing. But the idea that what motivates one's participation in society as a moral agent, or participation in the democracy as a citizen, is one's deeply held religious beliefs and a certain conception of an existent God that grounds those beliefs has a long, almost uninterrupted, tradition in American politics.

Rick: Thank you for putting it that way, Leigh, because now I see what my problem was earlier. I have no problem saying that religious belief can motivate political actions and your political engagements. I have no worry about that at all. What I meant to point to is that, for example, the Ten Commandments can't play a role in the U.S. judicial system. That religious edict can't be directly made into law. That's what I meant. I have no problem with someone coming out of a faith tradition that they hold near and dear to their hearts and find empowering in their lives to, on the basis of that, engage in political action.

Just don't tell me about it.

Leigh: Well, I mean, voting is telling you about it.

Rick: It's a don't ask, don't tell policy. Don't you all get really uncomfortable when someone like in public is starting to talk about Jesus?

Leigh: I don't.

Rick: Yeah, maybe this is a north versus south thing. Yeah,

Leigh: right. Yeah, just try to be in public in the south and not hear people talking about Jesus.

[musical interlude]

Leigh: So, wow, we really went at it this time. Maybe apologies to the listeners for the  long episode, but I think this was a fantastic conversation. Our bartender, unfortunately, thinks that we are done

David: Which begs the question, if God comes to the bar, what is he going to drink? Or is she going to drink? It doesn't

Rick: It doesn't matter, because it'll be an infinite drink.

Leigh: She is going to stop the infinite process of cause and effect and get us out of here. She's turned the lights off, stacking the chairs, so before we get out of here, I just want to give both of you guys a chance for final thoughts. David, I'll go to you first.

David: So something we didn't talk about, but I was hoping we would get to is this sort of Nietzschean proclamation: “God is dead.” And I want to point out that that's not really an ontological statement that Nietzsche is making. It's a moral statement.

Nietzsche says what has died is the Christian God in the way it has anchored our morality. And I think that's a very different kind of statement than saying that God doesn't exist. It's saying, what are we doing and how are we behaving and what does that tell us about our own theological grounding and what we think about ourselves?

Rick: Yeah. I also want to say that something we didn't talk about is what normally goes under the title “Pascal's Wager.” This refers to Blaise Pascal, part of Enlightenment Inc., who argues basically that you're better off believing in the existence of God than not. So, because there's the possibility of eternal punishment if you don't believe in God and there is a God, but if you believe in God and there is no God, there's no harm, no foul. So this is a bet you can make without losing it. It's about probability. It's about game theory. And because it's more about belief than the existence of God, that's why I left it out.

And I just want to say, I'm someone who will affirm that the question of whether there is a God or is not a God is something that cannot be proven at all. But as David pointed out earlier, I think there's something important in understanding philosophy when we look at these various ways to prove the existence of God.

What about you, Leigh?

Leigh: Well, since we're talking about things that we didn't talk about, I think one of the things that we  didn't talk about that is important to keep in mind is how important the belief in God or disbelief in God is in our most intimate human relationships. It has a lot of bearing on who we keep as friends, who we marry, who we want to have as neighbors and colleagues. Often that is a very, very, very delicate set of relationships to maneuver. And frequently we don't just have the conversation about the differences in our belief systems and how that might affect the way that we relate to one another.

But with that, we are out of here. Sorry, listeners. I don't think that we settled this question: “Does God exist or not?” But maybe we'll have a follow up episode where we pick it up again. I will catch you guys next time.

David: Bye.

Rick: Take care.

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