Christian Relaunch

God our Maker

The inanimate things, plants and animals of which our world consists blindly follow the laws that govern them but we, animals but more than animals, have choices.

The only plausible explantion is that we and our world have a maker, the transcendent creativity we call "God".

Objections

(Determinism) "Intentions are an illusion. Folk do whatever their nature, experience and circumstances make them do. So the question of whether some actions are improper cannot arise."

Are there intentions? Is it true that people act on purpose? But if I am asking that question I am intending to seek an answer, therefore intention is real. The very fact that I am asking the question shows that the answer is yes. The assumption that there may be no intention leads logically to the conclusion that there is intention, so the assumption must be false. For details, see The Concept of Intention and More But Not Less.

So the question can arise.

"The fact that we have intentions has arisen by chance."

Have there always been intentions, or did they arise only at a certain time (such as when man came to be)? If they arose at a certain time, the world until that time must have consisted of accidents. How then did the first intention occur? Assuming that things do not just "pop up", I infer that there is some kind of explanation.

The only plausible explanation I can think of is that it was intended.

And where there is intention there is an agent, in this case a creator.

(Nihilism) "I see no need to explain things. The world makes no sense. All events are accidental, and all things, our own minds included, just random arrangements of particles or waves or whatever the world consists of."

"It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Shakespeare, Macbeth.

If you are right, then any possible answer to questions like "How shall I live? What goals shall I pursue? How can I find out what is right and true" has nothing either in its favour or against it, and we are left acting at random. Since you clearly do not act at random, we can assume that you do not take your own objection seriously, that you also sense its implausibility, however much you may, for whatever other reasons, reject this insight.

"Most things have explanations, but human intention has none. It just popped up for no reason."

Why suppose such an exception when an explanation is available? A rather drastic explanation perhaps, but that is no reason to reject it when it is the only explanation.

"When the impossible has been eliminated, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

Arthur Conan Doyle, in at least one Sherlock Holmes story. (I think Holmes would count "it just popped up for no reason" as "impossible".)

"There is another explanation but we haven't discovered it."

This rejects the current best theory in the blind hope of finding a better one, against the usual rules of reasoning.

But the hope is worse than blind. We not only lack knowledge of what the explanation is, there seems to be no kind of explanation it could be. Every explanation tells us either what caused something, or who intended it. In this case the explanation could do neither because both possibilities have been ruled out.

(Evolutionism) "Darwin has shown that we are here by accident."

Many think this, but it is not true. For details, see Natural Selection.

"But if we were created, who created our creator, and so on? The above reasoning applies to them also, and the same reasoning leads to the idea of an endless series of higher and higher creators. This seems implausible."

Everything in the cosmos, ourselves included, had a beginning, is not self-sufficient, and can be explained. But this need not apply to the creator, who may be self-sufficient. Not just transcendent but self-intended and self-originating (or rather unoriginated, neither accidental nor intended). This seems the most plausible view.

(Pantheism) "Why treat whatever intended us as if it were a conscious individual? It may be a diffuse life-force from which we emerge by a spontaneous process, or something like that."

The supreme creator is very different from anything else, but some analogies are better than others. The creator is a designer, so the human mind is the nearest analogy, and we should follow the implications of that. Of course we must not jump to conclusions about this supermind, which is more than mind without being less, but for most purposes it is appropriate to see it as a mind. Thinking in terms of a force is just a way to evade the conclusions of our previous reasoning and get back to the comfort zone of supposing that we are an accident.