A Buddhist addresses arguments for the existence of god.

During our last meeting Avery Dulles said to me: “I hear that Buddhists haven’t settled the God question.” Of course he knew the answer—most Buddhist schools are non-theistic; they do not entertain the question of divinity, neither affirming nor denying a supreme deity, certainly not in the same way that Christians do. But in the realm of Catholic dogmatic theology, statements about the nature of divinity are the coin of the realm, and for Avery the existence of a godhead, a personal deity, was central along with expressing or “confessing” your assent to its existence.

That afternoon, despite our friendship, or perhaps because of that bond, I felt as though Avery was trying to pry out an answer that would undermine my Buddhist “beliefs.” His tone was friendly, loving, even playful, not in any way disapproving or forceful, but he was nonetheless serious. He may have been trying to push me towards a more traditional faith because for him, as for most serious Christians, assent to the existence of God, saying “I believe,” is key to salvation. I couldn’t respond that I still believed in God because honestly I was leaning more towards the agnostic end of the spectrum, an answer that would surely have disappointed him. My love for the man overrode any other considerations.

Avery was a Jesuit through and through, and I might have countered with an invitation to inquiry, but I didn’t have the skill to turn a rhetorical or speculative question into an opening. I didn’t know how my friend would take it, perhaps almost as blasphemy although my real fear was that he would have just made fun of the question—and me.

We might have waded into the tricky currents of sweeping, generalized truth statements that leave one floundering on rocky shores, or to return to my original thoughts about placing my bet on the right pony, the kind of restrictive notions about God that Jesuits liked to argue about, for example with M. Blaise Pascal and the Jansenists.

In a way this inquiry is a belated response to my friend. I am calling it “A Buddhist looks at the arguments for the existence of god.” In my view, examining the question of God's existence can only be done in terms of the question as posed and not in some universal ontological context of “than which nothing greater can be conceived.” We’re back to questions and answers. Spoiler alert: I will be arguing in favor of what I take to be the basic Buddhist non-theistic response.


“Why is there something?” (Hint: The question is itself un canard, French slang for "a hoax" or "a fabrication")

Firstly let’s look at the question itself. “Why is there something (as opposed to nothing)?” is a religious question. It is not scientific or psychological. It might be philosophical, but I will need to set some parameters. My characterization is not going to win me many converts among my religious friends who have been trained in the traditional seminary rendition of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s theology. Some even call it “the Big Question,’ encompassing questions of belief and unbelief, who we are, where we are in the universe, and how we got here. Our answers are expected to have the clarity of a clarion bell dispelling our doubts and clearing the path to salvation. Proponents and believers say that it deserves, even demands an answer. There is “Something” but we are going to define exactly what that something is. Or get as close as we can.

I am going to argue that it is not a good question. It is concocted, and deserves hair splitting questions directed at the disambiguation of all possible answers. It is poorly formulated which skews any answer. It’s really just a canard designed to introduce the question of god into ordinary discourse and untimely leads us down a rabbit hole. Any answer is at best an assessment of probability rather than a true statement. (See Ed MacKinnon’s paper: the proposition is a statement that can be held by reasonable people rather than a proof as in science or mathematics).

If we examine the way that a child learns about the world, his or her first question might be “what is that?” pointing to Fido. Then he or she might ask “why did Fido bite me?” or “Is Fido hungry?” but certainly not “Why is Fido there?” You usually don’t get to that before post grad philosophy and debating Kant’s idea of denotation or Gilbert Ryle’s “Fido-Fido fallacy” which he and Wittgenstein label “primitive word magic.”1 In our case “Something” becomes “identified meanings,” vaguely about god. This is much like the neo-Platonists identified the deities of Mount Olympus with ideas and virtues in order to pass the muster of logic. I am not saying that such questions are out of order, but that they need much more explanation and definition before we are allowed to label “something” as ontology and demand justification for its existence.

And because I am going first, I will lay out my objections.

Why “why is something?” is not a good question. We can begin with the concept of negation. It posits “not-Nothing.” However, there is no definition of “nothing” other than it is not all that presents itself to our minds, and even that is just my extrapolation or inference. (And it serves no purpose in the argument other than to get god in the door).

“Something rather than nothing” is not ordinary language. The way we normally speak does not include the inherent logical claim that we cannot know that something is something unless we posit its negation. We have to imagine a world in which “what is so” is not. That is of course absurd, and certainly not the ordinary turn of words. Joni Mitchell teaches us that “you don’t know what you got till it's gone.” What do we get when we take away something? Her answer is “a parking lot.” To be clear, her answer to the question is “what’s left, or what did we replace it with?” and not what is this thing (state or condition) that you are naming “Nothing?”

Ms. Mitchell is pointing to a strategy to affirm our knowledge (and appreciation), not an ontological definition of nothingness. Following Aristotle, Aquinas posits an orderly universe governed by natural law in which man has his place to know and serve God. In return he is promised cash and prizes (which he may or may not receive, another problem to which he will return later). At this point it is enough to say that It is also possible and legitimate in this universe to take away any promised benefits. That is variously called estrangement, hell or sin. Aquinas knows all this through faith, not reason or empirical observation though Aquinas does claim that there is no contradiction between faith and reason. When Darwin, Einstein and Heisenberg et al blew the supporting physics all to hell, modern schoolmen filled in the blank with whatever cosmological ideas they fancied, but again I would point to the neo-platonists filling their empty blanks with virtue and form when they kicked out Zeus and his buddies. Sleight of hand. Bunk. That’s a technical term.

I hesitate to use this analogy but why not, we are all adults. When Bill Clinton was asked in his famous deposition before Congress (and I hung on every word) if there was a sexual relationship between him and Monica Lewinsky, he initially said there "is" no sexual relationship (US News & World Report, Ronald Brownstein and Kenneth T. Walsh). He went on “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the—if he—if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.” Some commentators said that this was his pitch to the Talmudic scholars among his judges. I contend that he just needed to get himself out of a hot pickle. Theists using the word “something” to bridge the gap between science and faith are not much better than Clinton parsing the verb "to be.” And I don’t need a Rabbi to point to the duplicity because that is what we are doing--parsing the verb “to be.” There has “to be” something out there or we’d find ourselves in a hot pickle.

Let’s go back to our little Freddy or Frederica learning that Fido is a dog, and that there are some useful ways of behaving that will help avoid being bitten by Fido. They include feeding and training and learning to gauge Fido’s moods, as well as how to get him into his dog house if need be. But the question for me remains how do we get from there to “why do we have Fido rather than not-Fido?”

How did this become the religious question and why is it so important to get the correct answer? And to lay out the direction of my paper. I’m going to ask a Buddhist before Thomas Aquinas though I might use him as my reference point when I try to describe the hot mess that his religionists get us into. I am going to characterize four arguments for the existence of God. My intention is to just see if I can hold them as an object of meditation, in a good Buddhist way, but as I write them, I find myself trying to demystify them. They each have become almost a caricature of our culture’s way of thinking through these questions.


1 Meaning, Use and Rules of Use, Raziel Abelson. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research