The Epistemic Argument: An argument for knowledge of God’s existence

For many people, religion is a non-starter. Without first philosophically proving the existence of God, it just doesn’t matter to them what (biased) theologians, family or peers have to say. Since time immemorial, the search for proof of God’s existence has taken on many forms, from Anselm’s ontological argument to Aquinas’ cosmological arguments to various forms of the argument from design all the way to Kierkegaardian leaps of faith. While versions of these arguments still have advocates today, we would be hard-pressed to find even groupies willing to declare that the arguments are convincing or sound in a philosophical way. With modern philosophers (like W.K. Clifford) warning against accepting the belief in God’s existence based on arguments that fail to meet the evidential threshold, we would be remiss to follow that same folly. So in the following, I will present a version of one of those arguments that rises above the epistemic threshold you need to claim knowledge of God’s existence.

Like many arguments for God’s existence over the last millennium, we will start with a version of one of St. Thomas Aquinas’ four cosmological arguments.

Aquinas’ second argument concludes that there must be an uncaused causer, i.e. a first cause. The argument goes something like this: as we know that things exist, they must owe their existence to being caused by something else. There can’t be an infinite regress of causes. Something caused the first thing that is itself uncaused. We call that thing God.

There have been several famous questions lodged against Aquinas’ five arguments. The strongest defeater in my opinion – opined by Bertrand Russell, amongst others – is that an exception (i.e. the first cause) cannot prove the rule (i.e. all things have a cause): if everything has a cause, then the first cause (aka God) must also have a cause. But if this is the case, then the argument inherently fails.

Defenders of Aquinas’s cosmological arguments usually get stuck in the same quagmire that Anselm found himself in when defending his ontological argument against Paley’s attacks: most answers simply beg the question; we cannot just claim that God is a necessary being, or has no cause, or simply is the exception to the assumption of the impossibility of an infinite regress. If God is the exception, there is no rule, and hence Aquinas’ argument fails.  

If my argument stopped there, as did Aquinas’, we could be sure that agnostics and atheists would still sleep easy tonight with their continued beliefs about God. But, for the second step of my argument, we will take Aquinas’ cosmological argument and place a big band-aid on its gaping hole, courtesy of the world of epistemology. So, my argument will not prove the existence of God, but offer the epistemic justification to claim that you know that God exists. It might feel like we are splitting hairs, but it is an important distinction that is at the crux of the argument.

It is not my intent to review the conclusions of close to three thousand years of epistemology, but we wouldn’t be off the mark to claim that most people believe they have knowledge about a whole lot of things. Indeed, this is how we speak and what we mean when we say: ‘I know something about something.’ However, when we speak about our knowledge of things in the physical world, we may only be speaking about statistical truths, or about our own past experiences. The overwhelming majority of our knowledge comes from inductive reasoning. For example, everyone would agree that I know that the sun will rise tomorrow, even though there will be one day in the future that it will not, and there were millions of days in the past when it had not.

The fact that I know it will rise tomorrow is simply an assumption since it appears to me (and the people I respect) that the sun does rise every day. And yet, every sane person would agree that I have knowledge regarding the the fact that the sun will rise tomorrow. Meaning, it is more than an assumption or a claim to me; it is a fact. Similarly, when a doctor finishes medical school, everyone knows that each medicine prescribed, and each medical procedure carried out by doctors may not be effective on each individual. But, we would all claim that doctors have knowledge to heal even though that knowledge will not always lead the patient to health. Doctors’ knowledge is statistically true. It is based on information learned from past experiences that fails, even if implementing that knowledge fails to ubiquitously heal all potential patients. What these two examples highlight is that we claim to have knowledge in many situations that we are not 100%, even though we are certain that we have knowledge of the matter. Indeed, that is just what we mean when we say we know something: I am statistically certain, with some high statistical threshold that is consciously or subconsciously set.

Another way to look at this matter is from the perspective of utility. While Descartes understands that philosophy can only start by throwing out every fruit of the mind that is not completely rational in order to understand the world from scratch, Hume notes that almost nothing that we actually do is truly rational. Most of our beliefs are justified because they work. And, this is also how we speak, act and think. What we do makes sense to us given the info we have. We project observed regularities on the world.

Rational people do not fear that the sun will not rise; doctors prescribe medicines even though there might be exceptional cases that would lead the medicine to not only not the heal the patient, but even cause the patient’s death. We are certain that past experience (and knowledge learned from others’ past experiences) will not lead us astray, in general. We rest assured that the world will continue as is, even if David Hume points out that that belief is just a psychological feature of humanity and not a philosophical one. So to reiterate: we all agree that we have knowledge about many things, even though they are not deductive and not even 100% accurate. To have knowledge of a matter is NOT to have 100% certainty about it.

So let’s turn back to Aquinas. The way the physical world works – Aquinas rightly points out – is that everything has a cause, and then only once you get to a cause outside the natural world would you expect this infinite regress to stop. While here you would run into some of the defeaters lodged against Aquinas’ cosmological arguments, we can rely on the way that we speak about and understand ‘knowledge’ to claim that it must be the case that everything in the physical world has a cause, until you get to the exception. I know with statistical certainty that everything has a cause until I arrive at something outside the normal bounds of the physical world. I know this with the same level of certainty that I know that the sun will rise or that the doctor has knowledge to heal. In other words, you can rightfully claim to know God exists, based on a combination of St. Thomas Aquinas’s second cosmological argument understood through the world of epistemology.

To conclude, let’s amend Aquinas’ argument provided above: As we know that things exist, they must owe their existence to being caused by something else. I know that there cannot be an infinite regress of causes in the physical world. Something outside the physical world must have caused the world to exist. We call that thing God.

Addressing Problems with the Argument:

1. One problem that you may lodge against this argument, as well as all five of Aquinas’ cosmological arguments is that they fail to establish God as the first mover or first causer. They simply establish a first mover or first cause. Well, to establish the existence of a first-cause is itself philosophically beneficial. And, to those who want to claim that First Causer is something besides for God have their work cut-out for themselves. Additionally, even if you argue that the uncaused causer might be a pantheon of gods. To that we should say: so, you’re arguing for multiple invisible gods, instead of just one. Applying Occam’s Razor to that polytheistic assertion should be enough.
2. Another argument against our conclusion is that possibly the Big Bang has no cause, or that they can be an infinite regress. Brian Greene, American theoretical physicist and mathematician was asked what happened before the Big Bang event. He offered two answers: 1) There might have been many other quantum events. He explains that it could be that the Big Bang sparked the expansion of our part of space, but there might be a grander realm of space that we sit as only a smaller part, and that grander realm, might have its own Big Bangs, and might extend infinitely far into the past. This possibility re-opens the mostly rejected Aristotelian position (from The Physics, book 8) that the universe has no beginning. 2) The actual question may not make sense, as the Big Bang event 13.8 billion years ago is where time itself started. Neither of Green’s two answers upset our argument. According to Greene’s first answer, we arrive at an infinite regress again. According to his second answer, our definition of knowledge – that we know that each event in the physical world is caused – should dispel that issue.
3. Some cosmologists have argued universes may sometimes pop up out of nothing. While I have no way of evaluating this claim, we can note that the possibility, from a scientific perspective is flawed, as it is a case of one. This is the same point that some make against teleologists (or Aquinas’ fifth argument) – and specifically fine-tuning arguments – when they show that the earth is the perfect condition for the creation and sustainment of life. Unfortunately, you cannot make a sound scientific claim when you only have a sample set of one. One example makes bad science, even if it happens to be true, if science is to remain an inductive affair. Hence, we can ignore such a possibility for the purposes of our discussion. And if the physicist is just claiming to have discovered a mathematical algorithm that universe’s pop out of nothing sometimes, the math world will have to evaluate that, but we can be sure there is no universal acceptance of that theory now.
4. How can we claim knowledge about what happens outside the physical world? How do we even know something exists outside the physical world? One might need a whole other argument just to prove that! All these questions are reasonable, but they are off base. Our argument simply shows that we know that in the physical world an infinite regress is impossible. It does not matter what you think outside the physical world caused this. It could be that another physical world caused it, but nothing in our world could have caused it.
5. Why can’t you have an infinite regress in the physical world, and then you would not need to appeal to factors outside the physical world to explain the physical world’s existence? In short, independent of the question of whether an infinite regress could exist in the physical world, our epistemological argument here notes that when we speak about how we understand things, there are no examples of an infinite regress in the physical world that we are aware of, and the very notion would be outright rejected when we speak about any specific item or system in the physical world.
6. Don’t both Kant (based on his argument in the Critique, Section 4, that existence is not a predicate) and Maimonides (Guide II:17) argue that reason (i.e. an ontological argument) cannot ever give us knowledge of God or the a priori world, that which is beyond the senses, or even knowledge of anything in existence. To this, first, we must point out that we are not making a purely ontological argument. Our argument does not conclude that we have knowledge of God based on reason alone, but rather we make the epistemic argument that humans know that in the physical world an infinite regress is impossible. Peter W. Ross and Dale Turner (in “Existence Problems in Philosophy and Science,” 2013) make the distinction between philosophical existence problems and scientific existence problems. For them, philosophical existence problems involve intractable causal relations (i.e. a conclusive argument cannot be made), but by making our epistemic argument about causality, we are changing the argument about God from a philosophical existence problem into a scientific existence problem, and hence we can show the existence of a thing. This is because a philosophical existence problem around God involves an invisible being that has a tenuous relationship to the physical world at best; but a scientific existence problem has a causal relationship that provides evidence in the physical world for God, although obviously it is not conclusive evidence. Meaning, even Kant should agree that we are not making an ontological argument that predicates existence.
7. Does knowledge of God meet the threshold of a ‘justified, true, belief.” Well if you believe there is a God, independently, or based on the fact that you found the above argument compelling, then as long as there is a God, it is a JTB.

Well, with this knowledge in hand, I hope that you now have found the justification for claiming knowledge of God’s existence, and have fulfilled the first Mitzvah in the Rambam’s Yad, to know there is a first cause, aka God.