A Plausible Argument for God? | Rebecca Newberger Goldstein | Big Think

A Plausible Argument for God?

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The philosopher explains the “moral argument” for the existence of God and why it still holds some appeal for contemporary philosophers.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein:

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a novelist and philosopher. Her novels include "The Mind-Body Problem," "The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind," "Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics," and her latest, "36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction" (Pantheon Books).

In 1996 Goldstein became a MacArthur Fellow. In 2005 she was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2006 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Radcliffe Fellowship. In 2008, she was designated a Humanist Laureate by the International Academy of Humanism, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Emerson College, where she gave the commencement address.

Goldstein has taught at Barnard College, in the Columbia MFA writing program, and in the department of philosophy at Rutgers; has been a visiting scholar at Brandeis University; and has taught for five years as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. In 2006-2007 she was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Guggenheim Fellow. Currently she is a Research Associate in the Department of Psychology, Harvard University.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What is an argument for God’s existence that still carries weight in modern philosophy?

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Yes. I think actually one of the still most alive arguments is what I call in the appendix the moral argument, the belief that morality needs God’s will to ground it. Moral truths are somewhat mysterious. You know I keep talking about you know the pushback from the world as empirical evidence, but moral truths are… seem to be of a different nature from that, so that it’s not… it’s not when one’s saying look, slavery is wrong. We’re not saying we’ve decided that slavery is wrong or that, you know, that in my particular society we’ve outlawed slavery or we’re taking even a strong, you know, genocide is wrong. I think all of us believe this very strongly. I think everybody I’m talking to at least on Big Think believes this very, very strongly. How do we justify this belief? If you can do… Philosophers love thought experiments. You know if in fact, you know, Adolf Hitler had triumphed and had gone forth with his plan of exterminating all the undesirables. You know finished with the Jews and the Gypsies and the gays and gone onto the slogs and you know he had a whole agenda, a whole plan of who was going to be wiped out. Let’s say it had taken place and our world was that way. It was a world in which one believed this was a very good thing that all these undesirables had been wiped out, yet one could say that would be an immoral world. That is a moral monstrosity to consider. So these… There is something a little mysterious about these statements. They don’t seem to have an empirical grounding. They seem to be super empirical, transcendent and well if they’re transcendent don’t they need a transcendent force, a transcendent will that **** them? And so that I think has you know a certain cogency to it, the mysteriousness of moral truth, if you believe in them. You could say okay, they don’t really exist. I mean it really is a matter or sociology and psychology, but if you really do believe no, even had Hitler triumphed it is still true that genocide is wrong and that that would be a morally heinous world where does that come from? How do I know this if not because it comes from God? So I hope that I’ve now put even strong atheist into a state of, oh well, yes, tell us please, how do we get out of this, and you know, I do analyze that argument in the appendix. Do you want it quickly, yes?

I mean there are two parts to it, really. One is, and this is to me an extremely strong argument. There is one part is to say religion doesn’t help at all. There is a mystery here, but theology, theism, religion doesn’t answer it at all.

Read the full transcript at