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Ever wished for a killer proof to convince all of Twitter that God exists? Logan Gage, head of the philosophy department at Franciscan University, says there is actually a better strategy. Maybe just point to the variety of evidence, and help others to see it.
Cy Kellett:
I know you want it, but you don’t need that one killer argument to prove God’s existence. Dr. Logan Gage is next.
Cy Kellett:
Hello, and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers Podcast for living, understanding and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host, and especially in this, it used to be called an age of sound bites, but we’re even past the age of sound bites now. Now we’re down to just tweets, or just little quips or TikToks or whatever, and everybody wants to have that one killer argument, that one killer comment that’s going to do the job. Whatever we’re trying to prove, or whatever idea we’re trying to defend or promote, we’d love that killer one.
Cy Kellett:
And certainly, those of us who believe in God are susceptible to that. We see all this stuff going on. We see the level of the conversation is often at a one-sentence responds to another sentence’s level, and we want to have that killer argument. Well, our guest today is the head of the philosophy department at Franciscan University in Steubenville. And he says, “Stop it. You don’t need that one killer argument. There’s something even better than that.” Millions and millions of good arguments. Here’s what professor Logan Gage had to say.
Cy Kellett:
Dr. Logan Gage, the chair of the philosophy department at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio. Thanks for being with us.
Dr. Logan Gage:
Thanks for having me.
Cy Kellett:
I don’t know if you’re familiar with how things are debated on the internet, but there’s a lot of trying to destroy one another and have that killer argument, that perfect comeback, and it turns out that between Christians and atheists or believers in general and atheists, a lot of this goes on. And so since you’re the chair of the philosophy department at one of the most important Catholic institutions in America, I just wanted you to tell me, is there a killer argument? It has to be just one sentence where I will make all the atheists believe in God.
Dr. Logan Gage:
Yeah, I’m going to defer to St. Thomas here who says that there are good arguments for God’s existence, but they’re very, very difficult to follow. Very few people can do it and only with much exertion and much training. And so I would hope that the way we approach these arguments is to share lots of reasons we have for God’s existence and for the faith, more particularly, but not necessarily the one knockdown argument to vanquish all arguments. I guess I worry that if you put too much weight on any one argument, it ends up seeming like your case is more weak than it really is, because I think we have lots of good reasons for belief.
Cy Kellett:
Ah. So in a certain sense, a preponderance of evidence is an argument in itself.
Dr. Logan Gage:
Yeah. I mean, we might speak of an argument from so many arguments, right? But there’s an argument from so many lines of evidence, and unfortunately, I think after Descartes, we seek a certain kind of certitude from one killer insight or one killer argument, and I worry that, in a way, that underplays our case. Atheists have about one good argument and we have lots of them that are pretty decent, and altogether they’re overwhelming, in my view.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So I’m curious about what is the one good argument? I can’t see God? What would you say is the atheist one really good argument?
Dr. Logan Gage:
Yeah. It might look like they have a lot of different arguments, but for the most part, they’re all variations on the same theme, on some sort of argument from evil. And there’s a lot of things we can say about that. My own view, though, is that we should admit that it has some force. I mean, at times it doesn’t always look exactly what we would expect if there was a highly providential God watching over every single thing, but we also need to take into account the fact that, “Well, we’re not God, and there could be reasons for things that we don’t understand,” so we ought be pretty humble about it in the first. But let’s just say we even admit that it has a lot of force. Okay. Well, the fine tuning argument for God’s existence has a lot of force and is highly unexpected if atheism is true. So let’s just throw both of those out, and then we still have a bunch of really good theistic reasons. And there aren’t that many other serious atheistic arguments, in my view.
Cy Kellett:
Ah. I see what you mean. You could say to an atheist, for example, let’s take your strongest argument, our strongest argument. We’ll throw those two out. Let’s go to the second level argument.
Dr. Logan Gage:
Exactly.
Cy Kellett:
And there’s nothing on one ledger, or virtually nothing on one ledger. And there’s just … I really do actually think probably endless is the way to say it. There’s an endless number of reasons to believe in God on the other side of the ledger.
Dr. Logan Gage:
Yeah. I mean, think about it. Theists have contingency arguments for a necessary being, first cause arguments, design arguments, both cosmological and biological, moral arguments, arguments for beginning of the universe and time, miracles, including the resurrection, ontological arguments, reason, and consciousness, religious experience, the meaning of life, beauty. I mean, we could go on and on and on.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. I like going on and on and on, though. I think there’s a sense of the great richness we live in when you do, that we don’t live in a poverty of data. We don’t live in a poverty of inputs. We live in a richness of them.
Dr. Logan Gage:
Yeah. Absolutely. And that’s what we would expect, by the way, if God does exist, right. I mean, from a Thomistic standpoint, we would expect that God has filled out all the various levels of being, these levels of reality, and they all reflect him in some way. There should be multiple routes to be able to see him or, to put it in the Franciscan way, in the Franciscan tradition where Bonaventure speaks of vestiges and almost footprints of God everywhere or fingerprints everywhere left on the creation, and so there’s so many different pathways to see God’s existence. That’s exactly what we’d expect.
Cy Kellett:
Yes. Okay. Right. And so there’s a difference between … So you’re saying, if I could just … You started with reference to Thomas Aquinas. I’m guessing you did that because Thomas has the most orderly grouping of like, “Here’s all the really good arguments.” And even Thomas will say, “Well, these are proofs of God’s existence, but there’s a certain amount of intellect that’s going to be required to get these proofs. There’s going to be years of effort to understand these proofs, and your will is going to have to be disposed.” So a lot of stuff’s going to have to go right for these proofs to actually prove anything.
Dr. Logan Gage:
No, I think that’s exactly right. And difficult Aristotelian terminology that most people don’t know. The way I would put it to my students would be something like this. There’s more than one sense of a good argument for God’s existence, and one might just be a sound argument, right? You put it in a good logical structure, you put in true premises, and you’re going to get a true conclusion. That’s great, but there’s another sense of a good argument in terms of how effective is it going to be? Who’s it going to reach? Can ordinary people understand it? And the traditional arguments sometimes are very difficult for people to understand. I mean, they sometimes might not be the kind of thing you bust out in a coffee shop.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Right.
Dr. Logan Gage:
You know? But starting with common experience, whether it’s experiences of beauty or our moral experience, the experience from conscience, as John Henry Newman does. Those are more accessible pathways to most people. And maybe you don’t think they provide strict proofs or demonstrations, but they surely are good evidence that can lead us in the right direction. And what I want to say is, especially when you put them all other to form a cumulative case, it’s actually, in a way, much stronger to us maybe than if we rested all our weight on one killer argument because there could be some objection we’ve never heard of.
Dr. Logan Gage:
I mean, this happens to me. I’m a philosopher. People ask me questions. I don’t know the answer to everything, and I know those traditional proofs fairly well, much better than most people, but there’s always objections you’ve never heard of and things like that. And so I don’t want to be in the position of resting with all my weight on only one premise somewhere in some argument. I want to have lots of reasons. And what Newman, I think, is helpful for here is getting us to realize that’s the way we normally achieve certitude, right? So he gives these examples of, “I’m very certain that great Britain is an island. I’m utterly certain that I’m going to die.” Neither of those is demonstrable, but rather we’re utterly certain of those facts because they’re built up through numerous lines of evidence, experience and so forth.
Cy Kellett:
Yes. Right. Right. And that accumulation is … Whatever it is that humans are doing when we’re knowing things, it involves so many different acts that it’s not … Okay, so I suppose you referred to Descartes, the Cartesian hyperbolic doubt of everything. Is that in itself a bad strategy? Because what if someone said, “You know what? Yeah, I get it that life is full of all these rich inputs and all that. I just want to get rid of all that and get down to the absolute core of things.” Can I say, “Yes, you exist, Dr. Gates?” What else can I say? Is it just a bad strategy to do that?
Dr. Logan Gage:
It is a strange strategy, right? You’re seeking certitude, so you start doubting everything. But I would say a couple things there. I mean, number one, in fairness to Descartes, we often present him as doubting everything absolutely. But I do think in fairness to him, it’s more of a strategy. It’s more of, as we have sometimes put it, a methodical doubt. So he even says in the meditation, “I’m not really doubting everything. I mean, I know I have a body and so forth.”
Dr. Logan Gage:
But maybe he isn’t searching just for what he knows before he knows with utter certitude, the highest possible. And by the way, notice that’s not certitude in our ordinary sense because like I said, I’m certain of what I ate for breakfast. I’m certain that two plus two equals four. I’m certain that Great Britain is an island. At least the first and third of those ones I mentioned, those are not things that are utterly demonstrated. So maybe he’s not searching just for knowledge. Maybe searching for the highest possible kind of knowledge, and he wants to know how much of that he can have. But I guess I’m worried. Okay, first of all, I think it’s a genius project.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Right. Well, yeah.
Dr. Logan Gage:
I can appreciate it. I’m so glad he did it, but in my view, it’s a failure in the view of most epistemologians, almost everybody I know, it’s a kind of failure that by demanding only the absolute certitude, the highest possible kind, you’re not going to get very much out of it. I mean, if you start doubting the laws of logic, for instance, you’re not going to be able to build any arguments back up. So we all have to start somewhere. And so, to me, that’s a failed project of trying to always have 100% certitude. But unfortunately, even in Christian philosophy, sometimes in apologetics, we sometimes use his notion of certitude.
Dr. Logan Gage:
But in medieval philosophy, and the church has a long tradition of talking about certitude, we’re not always talking about Descartes certitude. In fact, I don’t think we really ever are. The church has distinguished, for instance, various degrees of certitude, which shows that we’re not always talking about 100%, couldn’t even possibly be doubted in a crazy thought experiment. We’re talking about ordinary certitude, real, genuine, normal certitude, the kinds of certitude we have that I’m going to die, and that I really have a body. Those kinds of certitudes.
Cy Kellett:
Do you think that some of that is undermined by … Well, two things. I wonder if our confidence in our ability to have any certainty is low, that you might say the person in the year 1200 probably had a high confidence that they could be certain about things that a person in the year 2022 no longer has that. Something has happened that we’ve lost confidence in our own ability to be certain. Would you agree with that?
Dr. Logan Gage:
Yeah, I think so. And I think certainly in the last century we’ve seen a lot of our institutions that have failed us from Watergate to Vietnam, whatever else. And we’ve all lost a general real confidence in a lot of things. But notice at the same time, the skepticism seems to be more towards political leaders, more towards, say, sexual ethics, more towards religion as a institution, if you will. Like you started off by saying, people on Twitter don’t lack any confidence.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, that’s true.
Dr. Logan Gage:
They’re utterly certain that a boy can be trapped in a girl’s body and all this kind of stuff that-
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Dr. Logan Gage:
They don’t display lack of confidence. So I actually think, by the way, that means our culture … For years, we’ve been saying we’re fighting this battle against this dictatorship of relativism, and that is present in some quarters. I think we’ve shifted very much back to a strict confidence in almost everything except a selective skepticism, if you will, about sexual ethnics and religion.
Cy Kellett:
Right. Right. Yeah. Okay. I mean, certainly when anything that has to do with sex, we have strong motivator in that we don’t want to be restrained.
Dr. Logan Gage:
Exactly.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Dr. Logan Gage:
Yeah, absolutely.
Cy Kellett:
All right. So if you’re saying that, look, a better strategy for talking with an atheist … because I think that’s what you’re getting at. You’re not saying, “A better strategy for coming to a scientific or philosophical proof of God,” but a better strategy person-to-person is a different strategy. Is that where you are?
Dr. Logan Gage:
I think so.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Dr. Logan Gage:
Although I think you can build quite a rigorous philosophical, cumulative case, though, at the same time. You’re still not talking about maybe a proof or a demonstration in the strict Aristotelian sense. But I don’t know. I mean, what we’re trying to do is find good reasons for belief, and we can show mathematically, in fact, that when you have numerous lines of evidence, we can give various weights to them and how strong we think the evidence is, and we can show pretty clearly that the various lines of evidence from beauty to religious experience and all these other things we were talking about, they really should raise at least your epistemic probability, if you will, not only of ordinary people, but of philosophers. I mean, things like fine-tuning and so forth are extremely unexpected on atheism, but to be much more expected, I think, on if God really exists. And so every time you run into one of those factors, it should be raising the probability of theism over atheism.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So at least strategically, I would think, because now you’re in a dialogue with an atheist, one of the things as far as strategy goes is, “But wait, there’s still more to think about,” to try to keep the conversation open to, “Well, why would you discount this?” For example, as part of the body of things that I might point to, say the religious experience of other people, that, okay, you might say, “I don’t have any experience of God,” and I think there are people who cannot identify an experience of God in their life.
Dr. Logan Gage:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
But millions and millions of people all around you say that they do have the experience of God. Should that at least be put on the scale or not? Do you see what I’m saying?
Dr. Logan Gage:
Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And somehow people think that’s too private or personal. I very much disagree because all kinds of things are private and personal, but we know other people have consciousness.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Dr. Logan Gage:
I can’t experience your consciousness, but I’m utterly certain that you are conscious. And if you tell me that you’ve experienced certain things, well, I mean, unless I know you to be an untrustworthy person, that’s certainly a good piece of evidence in favor of you really having that experience, and you’re more likely to have that experience if God really exists. But more than that, we have these sorts of experiences across cultures, across times and places. We have lots of testimony to this. And here’s what I wouldn’t want to do if I was the atheist. I wouldn’t want to say, “Oh, well, testimony is unreliable,” because if that’s the case, we know almost nothing about history. I mean, that’s all testimony, either written or oral. And so I think we good reasons from religious experience, and like you said, even from other people’s religious experience, maybe not even our own.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. And I remember Peter Kreeft, I think, said that what his students found persuasive was St. Matthew’s Passion by JS Bach, I think. He said they find that actually the most … And I don’t know exactly what he meant by that, but you were referring to beauty. How might beauty be part of this-
Dr. Logan Gage:
Oh yeah.
Cy Kellett:
… this conversation about the rich inputs we have?
Dr. Logan Gage:
Oh, yeah. Great question. So in his book with Father Tacelli on apologetics, that was the one argument I always found dissatisfying when I read it. He said something like, “Here’s the argument from beauty. Bach exists, therefore God exists.”
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Dr. Logan Gage:
And he says, “You either get this one or you don’t.” And I thought, “Oh, there’s got to be more to …” I know what he means.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Logan Gage:
But there’s got to be more to it than that. And so as a philosopher, I want to keep probing this. I think here are some things about beauty that do point in God’s direction. Number one, the fact that there are objective aesthetic facts. There are facts about what’s beautiful. I mean, if you think Swedish death metal is as beautiful as Bach, you’re just wrong. And that’s not to denigrate it. It could have its uses. Maybe in the weight room, you’re pumping iron and you want to listen to Swedish death metal. That’s great. But to say that it’s more beautiful, I think, would be a clear mistake, or those pink flamingo yard kit things, those aren’t as beautiful as Rembrandt.
Dr. Logan Gage:
But that’s a strange thing about our world, that it contains not only moral values, but it contains these aesthetic values. Real truths about what’s beautiful. That’s a strange thing. And on atheism, it’s hard to see where that comes from or what those are. So the fact that there are these objective facts about what’s beautiful is, I think, a testament to a more fundamental, beautiful reality in God. I’d also say that the experiences themselves can be quite overwhelming. In fact, one of the big atheists today in the philosophy world, Paul Draper, at Purdue University, writes a rather eloquently of his experiences of beauty. And he says that he would believe God because of it, except for he’s been a big proponent of the argument from evil.
Dr. Logan Gage:
And so he thinks that, “Well, I would believe in God based on that, but it gets overruled or trumped by all the evil,” or Anthony O’Hear at Oxford writes eloquently, as an atheist, of his experience of beauty and the fact that it seems to indicate a deeper and … that it seems to put us in touch with the transcendent reality, he says. So the quality of the experiences themselves, the fact that there are these facts about beauty, I mean, those are highly unexpected on atheism, but they’re much more to be expected if there’s a good, beautiful, fundamental reality at the heart of everything.
Cy Kellett:
Now there is a certain kind of atheism, though, and I don’t think this is indicative of all atheists, that will reduce that and will say, “Well, it’s sensory inputs. Your senses like certain …” The frog’s senses like certain things, and the frog’s senses are repelled by certain things. You’re the same kind of creature. For some reason, your senses are attuned to Bach. I don’t want to get on the wrong side of the Swedish death metal community, but I’ll go with your example. So your senses find that more coarse. So what about that reductive argument in the face of the argument from the richness of the inputs?
Dr. Logan Gage:
Yeah, I think that’s a mistake. I mean, that is more or less David Hume’s view, that we call things beautiful that we just happen to like.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Dr. Logan Gage:
I don’t think that’s true, though. So for one thing, notice that there are experts on beauty. Well, why would that be if beauty is just whatever we find pleasurable, right?
Cy Kellett:
Ah, Yeah.
Dr. Logan Gage:
Think about the fact that your aesthetic sense, your sense of what’s beautiful, I hope, is more honed today than it was when you were 12 years old. So the very fact that you can get closer to the truth on this signals that there’s a real truth about it. I mean, it’s always true that you like what you like, but you think you’re better at making these aesthetic judgments, these judgments about beauty than you were as a kid. And I hope, rightly so. And so it seems like there’s a truth independent of us that we’re getting closer to. I think it’s a total mistake to say it’s whatever we happen to like.
Dr. Logan Gage:
In fact, don’t you look inside yourself sometimes and say, “Well, I don’t know. I have a weakness for REO Speedwagon or whatever it is, even though I know it’s not Bach.” And you might almost look at yourself sometimes and say, “Oh, well, it gives me pleasure. I’m fond of it, but I recognize it’s not the most beautiful music ever created.” So I think it’s a mistake to equate what we like or what we find pleasurable with what is objectively beautiful. We think we can tell the difference.
Cy Kellett:
If we have the will to admit it, though. I do think sometimes that’s what’s lacking, is the sense of … Extreme skepticism says that, “Yeah. Okay. I have had an experience walking into a great building that does, in fact, seem different than the other experiences of my life.” And maybe that building was a church, or maybe it was some other thing. But I’m not willing to trust that. It just seems to me, we have a default to dismissal in the modern … I would say late modern mind.
Dr. Logan Gage:
Yeah. But maybe one thing we could try to get the person to see is that, well, but isn’t it some reason in favor of a transcendent reality? Isn’t it some reason in favor of an ultimately good or beautiful being? And maybe you don’t give it that much weight, but like I said, I’ve listed a dozen other kinds of arguments, and if each one, even a little bit, raises the likelihood that God exists, then it’s doing its job. And by the way, some people are much more sensitive to beauty, and it’ll be a very strong reason for them. That could differ between persons, and so I say let 1,000 flowers bloom, and let’s try to offer good, and sometimes maybe just modest reasons for belief. But they can really add up over time, it seems to me.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. If you’re going to use a shorthand, which we often do have to use a shorthand, because we’re communicating via Twitter or something like that, part of the shorthand is to be able to say, “There’s overwhelming evidence for God. That’s why you should believe in God.” And then the retort is, “There’s not overwhelming evidence.” But if our argument is, “Well, how can you have a motion without a first mover?” Well, okay. Now we’re in an argument that is probably not going to bear fruit. So I guess what you’re saying is there is a …
Cy Kellett:
I want the shorthand answer, though, as an apologist working for an apologetics outfit, because here’s what will happen to us. We’ll post this video, and then someone will comment something like, “You keep rationalizing your belief in an angry sky God.” And that’s the interaction we have with that person. And I would like that interaction to be fruitful in some way. It never is because I’m a horrible person and I’ll write something snarky back. But if I were a good person, it does seem to me that you want a packaged thing that could say, “Well, here’s a door that we might open.” It doesn’t finish the argument, but starts the argument, in other words. And what would that be to you? What’s the thing that you might invite the person to reconsider in the light of the overwhelming evidence?
Dr. Logan Gage:
Yeah. I guess I would say a couple things. I’d say, number one, we’ve all got to be careful with skepticism. And number one, we need to question whether it’s selective in us. I mean, do we only write these comments on this, but then we’re so confident in our controversial political views and so forth, and we’re not skeptical about any of that? So I guess I would ask our atheist friend to consider whether this is a selective skepticism. I mean, this is the kind of thing that going to graduate school in philosophy really knocks out of you because you sit in a room with these crazy smart people for several years and you realize, “Well, wait a minute. If we take a skeptical attitude toward anything, we can knock anything down.”
Cy Kellett:
You can, yeah.
Dr. Logan Gage:
Well, that’s not-
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Dr. Logan Gage:
That’s not impressive. That’s not impressive. I mean, you get enough smart people in room and we can come up with objections. What we want are the sort of intellectual virtues or the dispositions to know when we’ve raised a really good objection or just a mild one. We need that wisdom to sort through, “Is this a serious objection? Is this just a random possibility? And am I only driving at my skepticism to get the conclusion that I want?”
Dr. Logan Gage:
The other thing that I think Pascal is helpful here to get us to examine our heart and why do we see the evidence the way we do? So Pascal famously says, “There’s enough light for those to see who want to see, and enough darkness for those who don’t.” Let me give you an example from my own life. So if I’m really trying to get some work done, or I think I deserve a lot of time. “I’m the father of this house and I deserve at least some alone time,” and my kids interrupt me. You can see them through a jaded lens, right? You see them as an interruption rather than as the beautiful gift of God that they are.
Dr. Logan Gage:
If in ordinary cases, the disposition of our heart makes us see reality differently, and we know in that case, in a bad way, in a way that’s not truthful, we’ll just notice that other aspects of our life are going to be like that, too. The disposition of our heart as to whether we really want there to be a God, whether maybe we’re angry at God for things that happened to us when we were little, all those things I would just ask our friend to consider that when you’re driving at that kind of skepticism, there are often these deeper things going on that make us react so strongly and make us, by the way, say things we don’t really think. The idea that there’s no evidence for God, that’s just really silly. I mean, let’s be honest, that’s really silly. To say that it’s not super compelling to you, well, okay. That might be right. We need to talk through that and why you see things the way you do and why I see things the way I do.
Dr. Logan Gage:
But notice that if you want to push skepticism far, well, great. I mean, you might not end up believing in the material world or in your own existence. I mean, philosophers can do this all day long. It’s not really very impressive to just be overly skeptical all the time. The question is, “Don’t we want a prudence or wisdom about how much to be skeptical, and to know ourselves,” as Socrates says, “well enough to know when we’re just driving out of conclusion,” either for God or against God, to examine ourselves and say, “Well, are we just trying to win?” I mean, as Christians, we can get in that, too, right?
Cy Kellett:
Sure.
Dr. Logan Gage:
And when you catch yourself doing that, you need to slow down and say, “You know, that was a good objection. I need to think about that. I don’t have an answer to that. But because I have all these other reasons, I’m thinking that I will find an answer to this objection.” That would be more humble and probably more honest and more helpful than just, ourselves, getting in that mode where we’re just driving at conclusions.
Cy Kellett:
You certainly feel that in dialogue, like in our media ministry. It’s fascinating to me that you think that the argument from evil is the primary argument against God, because that is a very humbling argument to a Christian. It’s one where you go, “There are so many things that involve a certain kind of trusting in God that are part of the answer to that, that if one doesn’t have trust in God …” Those arguments really are good arguments. They really are a good argument. I mean, even God answered the question to Job in a way that at least half of humanity finds completely unsatisfactory. How could God say that?
Dr. Logan Gage:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
So that is a very humbling thing, to come face to face with the argument from evil, when it’s well made or sincerely made.
Dr. Logan Gage:
Absolutely. I would note that, though, in the philosophy literature, the discussion at one point was about whether evil utterly makes it impossible for there to be a God. And for some time, some smart people thought that. But basically no one in philosophy thinks that today. The most famous atheists today don’t think it utterly defeats belief in God. They think, though, that it makes God’s existence far, far less probable, that it’s a very strong probabilistic case against God. No one thinks that it just utterly means that God absolutely can’t exist. And the reason for that, of course, is that we can have reasons for allowing evil, right? I mean, you see this as father. You can see it in your children, sending them to get their teeth pulled or something like that. Sometimes for the greater good, you have to allow some evil.
Dr. Logan Gage:
And so as long as God has reasons, whether we know what they are or not, he can exist alongside evil at the same time. But I do think that we might go so far as admitting that the argument has some force. I mean, we certainly don’t know the reasons for all the evils, especially for very particular ones. We don’t know. I mean, there are some things we can say, but we don’t know all the given reasons. The only thing I would say, as I said earlier, was the atheist here shouldn’t think that this is such a killer argument that then defeats all of our arguments. It’s one piece in a larger puzzle. And we ought to admit it’s the most mysterious piece, I think.
Cy Kellett:
Certainly, yes.
Dr. Logan Gage:
It’s the line of evidence that maybe fits least well with our view of a providential God, but it’s certainly not utterly incompatible with it. I mean, to be overly confident in the argument from evil seems to me a very, very big mistake.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. But how hard it is to answer the person who, particularly in a specific instance, will say, “Well, how could there be a loving God who would allow this?” And sometimes the “this” that comes on the other side of that is truly horrific and very humbling to hear someone talk about.
Dr. Logan Gage:
No, absolutely. And usually those aren’t the instances where we need to bust out an apologetic argument. We need to probably be friends with people and really love them, and in a sense, be God’s hands and feet and shoulder to cry on for them, experientially, much more than, say, a philosophical argument where we know that God could technically allow evil and still be good. So we’ve got to separate this pastoral problem, if you will, from this logical difficulty.
Cy Kellett:
I do feel like, and we’re coming to the end of our conversation and I’m very grateful for it, but I feel like part of the practical result of this conversation on a person like me, who deals with people in the media all the time, is calm down a little bit. There isn’t a killer argument for God that you can just drop on everybody and just memorize it or get so skilled at it that you can drop this bomb on everybody, and everyone’s just going to go turn into a believer. Maybe I’ll pose it to you this way as a closing question. That seems like a kind of desire for control when I want that argument, that I want to have something so powerful that you can’t weasel out of it, and what you’re proposing is give up the control and invite the person into a conversation about the grandeur of the evidence.
Dr. Logan Gage:
Yeah, absolutely. That desire to win, that desire for control, that desire to vanquish all my foes, right? I think that’s just not the help … And by the way, I just think, personally, striking that attitude with our atheist friends is not very winsome either. And it doesn’t seem to display a confidence in the full sweep of the evidence, right? I mean, I really think that the creation really does manifest God’s glory over and over and over again. And we don’t just need to lean so hard on one thing, and we can just look at it, I hope, honestly and dispassionately. And by the way, that frees you up.
Dr. Logan Gage:
I mean, you can look at it much more dispassionately when you realize your belief rests on all these things, maybe experiences you’ve had, the testimony from the church, various lines of evidence you’ve heard, when you realize it has a much more firm foundation because it’s so many things you’re resting on, that can free you up, then, for instance, when your atheist friend says, “What about this evil?” And you say, “I don’t totally know. There are some things I can say, but I recognize they’re not fully satisfactory. But I feel like I have all these other good reasons.”
Dr. Logan Gage:
And by the way, the catechism, when it speaks about proofs for God’s distance, really does talk like this. I think it’s in paragraph 31, where it basically says that these ways to God are these converging and convincing arguments that give us a certitude about the truth of God’s existence. These are converging arguments coming together, all pointing in the same direction. And for me, I’ll just be, personally, I find that much more satisfactory than if I had all these arguments against God, and then only one killer argument for God. I’d be nervous about resting with all my weight on one thing.
Cy Kellett:
Dr. Logan Gage, chair of philosophy at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. I have enjoyed this conversation so much. I hope that you have at least enjoyed it enough that you’ll come back and have more with us.
Dr. Logan Gage:
Oh, anytime. Thanks so much for having me.
Cy Kellett:
I find it very, very helpful. I do want you to know that in your presence, my beard feels very insecure.
Dr. Logan Gage:
It’s a requirement for philosophers.
Cy Kellett:
Yes. You have the philosopher’s beard. You do indeed. Thank you, Dr. Gage.
Dr. Logan Gage:
You bet.
Cy Kellett:
What a great privilege to get to talk with Dr. Logan Gage. I haven’t gotten to speak with him before, but another fine example of all the great work they do and all the great education that I’m sure goes on there at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio. I don’t know why I would be surprised. I know a lot of people who went to Steubenville, and they’re all wonderful people, very well prepared in their faith. And it’s also a relief just to have the assurance of this very fine philosopher that you don’t need that killer argument.
Cy Kellett:
You just don’t need that killer argument for God’s existence. It’s better to refer to just the overwhelming evidence everywhere. Some of that evidence is proofs, but we don’t even have to have proofs. We can just refer to things that increase the probability or show the probability and show all the various kind of goods that we have, all the riches that we have as far as argumentation. Just show a little bit of it, and it might move hearts and minds. You don’t need that killer argument. Oh, I know you want it. I want it, too. I want to just shut down the argument and win. But you don’t need to do that. Open up the argument and have a conversation. Maybe lead somebody to contact with the living God.
Cy Kellett:
Thanks a lot for your support here. If you want to continue supporting us, maybe financially, you could do so at givecatholic.com. Just go over to givecatholic.com, leave a little note, say that it’s for Catholic Answers Focus. If you’re watching us on YouTube, please subscribe and hit that little bell so that you’ll be notified when new episodes are available. We really have been growing a lot on YouTube. Help us to continue to do that by becoming a subscriber of the podcast. If you’re listening, Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or any of the other podcast services, please don’t forget to subscribe. That does help us grow the podcast. And if you are so inclined, please, a few nice words about what you find here at Focus that might encourage others to give us a listen, or maybe even those five stars, those tantalizing five stars that make other people want to tune in. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. Always grateful to get to spend this time with you. We’ll see you next time, God willing, right here with Catholic Answers’ Focus.