There have been many arguments for God’s existence made throughout the centuries. Some have been better than others. There is one argument, though, that is especially thought-provoking.
It’s known as the Transcendental Argument for God (TAG).
According to its proponents, justification for anything is impossible unless God exists.
In the 18th century, an agnostic, if not atheistic, philosopher named David Hume shook European philosophy to its foundations by arguing that those foundations had been metaphysical fictions.
For all of their differences, early modern philosophers agreed that what we directly know are ideas. Rationalists, who maintained that knowledge derives from reason, not sense perception, held that we enter the world with these ideas already in the mind; they are innate. Empiricists, in contrast, asserted that our ideas derive from experience.
All concurred that it is through our ideas that we access reality, for ideas, it was claimed, represent or correspond to the things in the world.
Hume, an empiricist, noted that if, as he and his empiricist and rationalist predecessors insisted, it is our ideas to which we have immediate access, then the knowledge claims these same philosophers had traditionally made could not be justified. We could never claim how we truly know them, so we could never claim to be certain of their truth or reality.
That there are bodies and minds (material and mental substances) that remain essentially the same over time even while their qualities are constantly changing, and that these objects are situated within a system of mutually interlocking, necessary causal relations, i.e., a universe, that is self-continuous. According to Hume, these claims cannot be genuinely known, for they purportedly reference the world as it exists in itself, a mind-independent reality. Yet it is only the stuff of our own minds, “ideas,” to which we have access.
Whether these ideas accurately correspond to or reflect a world outside of our own minds is something that, by definition, it would seem, we can’t know at all.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant said that Hume’s radical skepticism awakened him from his “dogmatic slumber.” If Hume were correct, then knowledge, Kant saw, would be impossible. So, Kant developed his philosophy to meet Hume’s challenge. In doing so, he revolutionized that branch of philosophy known as “epistemology,” the philosophy of knowledge.
Kant argued that object-permanence, time, space, objective causation, etc., are features of the human mind. Our sensory inputs are filtered through them. Put another way, the only world we can ever speak is the world as it’s been constructed by the mind.
Imagine that human beings are born with red-lensed glasses embedded into their skulls. If that were the case, then, necessarily, human beings would perceive the world in terms of varying shades of red. The only world that they could ever know is a red world. Kant is saying something similar: We necessarily must experience the world as a single totality of objects, of substances, that exist over time and that co-exist with other objects in space in a system of causal relations, because these are the terms in which the human mind shapes the material of the senses.
Kant’s work is a tour de force that revolutionized Western philosophy. Still, Kant exacerbated skepticism, for he psychologized epistemology by distinguishing the world as we experience it (“phenomena”) from the world as it exists in itself (“noumena”). His whole point is that we can never know the latter, the world as a mind-independent reality.
So, is Hume’s skepticism capable of being surmounted? It has been argued that as long as human beings continue opting for autonomous philosophies—as long as we continue, as the ancient philosopher Protagoras put it, to make “man the measure of all things”—then it will never be possible to justify any of our knowledge claims genuinely. Hume’s challenge will remain.
However, if, on the other hand, we opt for a theonomous worldview—a God-grounded worldview—then, and only then, we will indeed be able to make knowledge attainable.
The Law of Identity (A is what it is, and is not what it is not); the Law of Excluded Middle (Either A is alive or A is not alive), and the Law of Non-Contradiction (A can’t be itself and not itself, in the same respect and at the same time)—these are the most fundamental laws of logic. They are the presuppositions of all thought. As such, they are universally, absolutely, and necessarily true. They do not vary from person to person, culture to culture, or from one epoch to another. They don’t vary at all.
And this means that they are not composed of or arise from matter. Matter, the physical, is constantly mutating. Matter is limited to space. The laws or principles of logic are concepts. They must, then, transcend matter. They are grounded in…Mind.
They aren’t grounded in my mind or your mind. My mind is not yours, and both of our minds are finite, contingent, and relative. The laws of logic are not subjective. They transcend our limited, subjective minds.
This, in turn, implies that it is a mind, or Mind—an infinite, eternal, changeless, absolute, non-contingent (or necessary) Mind—that must be the ultimate ground of the laws of logic.
And this Mind, obviously, is that of God.
Mathematical truths, like 2+2=4; the enduring existence of objects over time; causation; the uniformity of the natural world (and, hence, the possibility of science); the trustworthiness of rationality; the meaningfulness of language and its ability to communicate thought; the objectivity of morality—these as well point beyond matter and our own spatially and temporally limited minds to a transcendent Mind.
In short, according to this Transcendental Argument for God (TAG), only if God exists can we justify these other fundamental assumptions upon which our other beliefs rest. For those who insist that it is through experience that we come to know the truth of these beliefs, the answer to them is at once swift and decisive: These beliefs are the presuppositions for experience itself.
To repeat, it was Hume, the empiricist, who observed long ago that experience can never ground specific knowledge and can only lead to radical skepticism.
All of this means that attempts to argue against TAG, or for atheism, or, for that matter, attempts to claim for any position at all implicitly reinforce the existence of God. Any endeavor to make a rational argument or a coherent sentence implies the reliability of reason and the reality of meaning. But only if the cosmos is not an ever-shifting, ever-evolving/devolving material accident, but underpinned and infused with Logos, i.e., with Mind, with Reason, can we make ultimate sense of any of this.
Or so goes the Transcendental Argument for God. It’s definitely worth considering—assuming, of course, that you think that reason is reliable.