New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy

This book was used as the text for a graduate course in Theology that I took at the Catholic Distance University using lectures that Fr. Spitzer recorded. Frankly, I would not recommend the course or book to anyone who has a scientific background and is looking for help bridging the gap between science and religion. From my experience, most people who major in science don't talk much about religion so it is hard to know what they really believe, but I suspect that even if they were taught as children to believe that man was created in the image of God, deep down they see an image of God as a "being" created by man in his own image. So when they hear a religious person talk about God, they immediately assume that the speaker is referring to that "being" rather than the pure act of being itself.That is the image that I imagined to be in Fr. Spitzer's mind in week 1 of the course (part I of the book) when he said, "The first question is, can science disprove the existence of God?" Of course his answer was no, so in my mind, his first goal was to discredit science and present "his way" (i.e. the Church's way) as being superior to the scientific method. But then he used the big bang as if it were scientific proof that the universe had a beginning. As a Catholic and a scientist, I know "God" as the name for "truth itself," which is what I have always worshipped. I don't believe in the big bang; I see truth as eternal and whether or not the universe had a beginning is irrelevant to me.I think it would have been much better if Spitzer had started with the discussion that explained what the word God really means to him and what the reader should be thinking (and not picturing) when the word is used. He finally got to it in week 11, where he said "What can we say we actually know, when we put out that notion of God? What is coming into our minds? One thing that can’t be coming into our minds first and foremost, is a picture of God." That, and the discussion about the transcendentals (part 3 of the book) should have been made abundantly clear right up front. I think that most scientists would be satisfied with the notion that "God is truth itself" and would agree that truth itself is self evident. Truth exists and the idea of trying to prove that is ridiculous. To prove something means that you demonstrate the truth, i.e. you would use truth to prove that truth exists. In other words, you prove it by using it. The transcendentals (Being itself, Truth itself, Love itself, Goodness itself, and Beauty itself) are all concepts that we experience and can relate to, so even if someone is repulsed by the word god (or the name God), everyone is attracted to the transcendentals.I have to agree with a book reviewer, (the Traveller) who said that the author tried to present the material at a popular level that the reader could understand and evaluate, but failed. "Spitzer," he said, "brings up some very technical scientific disputes to show how his side comes out ahead, but the nonspecialist reader will be in no position to judge the accuracy, completeness, or fairness of the presentation. In particular, the "Postscript" by Bruce Gordon is so opaque that one wonders what the authors thought they were doing. In the end, the reader is just being asked to believe their conclusions."On the other hand, the book is very informative for someone who wants to know how philosophers and theologians think. Spitzer did a good job explaining how conditional logic (If-then statements including modus ponens and modus tollens) and non-contradiction are used to reason and then uses them to present the reasons why his premises can be considered proven. Whether or not the reader sees the truth in what he says and can distinguish it from any errors is entirely dependent on the reader's willingness to see truth itself, i.e. "God".

This is a book in the Catholic Scholastic tradition by the Jesuit professor Robert Spitzer. It attempts two things that may be impossible: proving the existence of God and discussing the subject at a popular level. It makes a good stab at the first, but not at the second.Before the main philosophical arguments there are two chapters intended to show that the findings of modern physics support the existence of God. The persistent problem with these chapters is that they are presented as material that the reader can understand and evaluate, but they are not. Spitzer brings up some very technical scientific disputes to show how his side comes out ahead, but the nonspecialist reader will be in no position to judge the accuracy, completeness, or fairness of the presentation. In particular, the "Postscript" by Bruce Gordon is so opaque that one wonders what the authors thought they were doing. In the end, the reader is just being asked to believe their conclusions.Chap. 1 argues that physical models that have the universe going back infinitely far in time cannot work. Therefore the universe must have had a beginning in time. Spitzer invokes what he calls the "metaphysical principle" that nothing comes from nothing and concludes that the universe must have a cause (God) outside physical reality. This argument is a non sequitur that is repeated later. He actually is assuming that whatever begins to exist must have a cause outside itself. That is a different metaphysical principle that seems to beg the question and at least calls for its own justification.The principal arguments in the book are the philosophical ones, which center on the notion of a "condition". This takes the place of a cause in classical proofs. The difference is that all kinds of entities can be conditions: an individual, a particle, a state, a plasma field or quantum field, a wave, energy, the space-time continuum, spatial-temporal position, physical laws, structures of complexes, magnetic monopoles, quantum information, etc. The first thing to know is that conditions condition each other. Everything in our world has a condition for its existence, and each condition has a preceding condition, so that they make up simple linear chains extending backward. Spitzer does not specify whether the conditions are necessary or sufficient for what they condition, or what it specifically means to condition the "existence" of something.The second thing to know about conditions is that they are not all at the same level. In fact, they form a "tree of being", in which more specific entities are conditioned by more general and fundamental entities. Electrons are conditioned by fields, which in turn are conditioned by energy and space-time. A cat is conditioned by its cells, which are conditioned in turn by smaller and smaller elementary particles and structures of particles. The condition is more simple and inclusive, and less limited, than what it conditions. It is compatible with more states and acts with less restriction. (It seems inappropriate to apply the word "acting" to conditions in general. Space and time and physical laws do not act.) Thus the receding series of conditions extends upward to more and more God-like properties.Unfortunately, we get no clear idea of what counts as a condition, or why conditions have to fall in a certain linear order so that they become more powerful while they become less determinate. The next question is whether each receding chain of conditions comes to an end or is infinite. Spitzer puts much effort into showing that it cannot be infinite.Any aggregate, he says, has to be "achieved" in a series of steps. If a present reality depends on an infinite series of prior conditions, there must be a sequence of infinitely many steps leading up to the present reality. But an infinite series cannot be completed, so the present reality can never be produced. A similar argument is that a conditioned reality CR1 cannot exist unless its immediately prior condition CR2 exists, and this in turn cannot exist unless its immediately prior condition CR3 exists, etc. Hence CR1 cannot exist unless the whole prior series exists. If there is no first member at the beginning of the series, the series does not begin at all and CR1 is never produced. But by requiring a first member, Spitzer is simply assuming that there cannot be an infinitely receding series with no first member. That is just what needs to be proven.Spitzer makes a special effort to show that an infinite past time is impossible. He quotes the mathematician David Hilbert to the effect that a mathematical infinity cannot exist in reality because finite mathematics then would not apply to reality. But he fails to explain what Hilbert's argument is or whether he applied it to an infinite past time. In any case, he offers his own quasi-mathematical argument.In Spitzer's interpretation, time is not infinitely divisible. Any time interval must consist of a finite number of ultimate small intervals. (This view is inconsistent with the differential calculus and many other things.) Thus, if there are three successive time intervals T1, T2, and T3, the duration of T2 has to be nonzero if one wants to keep the state of affairs at T3 from collapsing into that at T1. If a cat is alive at T1 but dead at T3, there must be between them a nonzero interval T2 in which neither is the case, in order to keep the cat from being alive and dead at the same time.But according to Spitzer this cannot work if T1, T2, and T3 are intervals in an infinite past time. One might suppose that it doesn't matter how many intervals there are outside T1, T2, and T3. But Spitzer argues that if there are infinitely many, then T2 becomes "the functional equivalent of a dimensionless point". This is because if T2 is removed from the infinite set of past time intervals, the remainder is still an infinite set. Since the expression "functional equivalent of a dimensionless point" has no particular meaning, Spitzer can take it to mean two different things: that removing T2 does not change the multitude of the set of time intervals and that T2 does not do its job of separating T1 from T3. Thus he can mistakenly take the two meanings as equivalent. Then it follows that the idea of an infinite past time makes all the times coincide. But the argument was hopeless from the beginning and illustrates in an ugly way Spitzer's conception of "metaphysics."When he has ruled out an infinite regress of conditions, Spitzer can move swiftly to the existence of God. Each series of conditions now goes back to an unconditioned starting point. This unconditioned conditions not only the next member of the series, but every member. Because of Spitzer's peculiar concept of a condition, something cannot condition another thing that has different properties from it. The unconditioned must have no properties that are "incompatible" with the properties of any of the conditioned members of the series, so it must be at the highest level of simplicity and inclusiveness. Hence, the unconditioned has no properties at all and becomes essentially empty. For Spitzer, what distinguishes it from nothing is the claim that it is "absolute simplicity in act," the most powerful kind of agent.The next step is to argue that there must be only one unconditioned. Although the world is supposed to contain a huge number of chains of conditions, now they all go back to one first member that starts off all the chains. The reason is that if there were more than one unconditioned, they would keep each other from being completely simple and pure. Next, since the unconditioned reality is not excluded by any other reality at the highest level of simplicity or below it, it is unrestricted, and being unrestricted makes it infinite. Hence it acts with infinite power. Finally, the unconditioned is the ultimate power that fulfills the conditions of the existence of everything else at every moment, and so the unconditioned creates all other realities continuously.So this is a novel proof of the existence of God based on his not having any of the properties of created things. Spitzer then takes up some ideas from Bernard Lonergan to argue that God must be an unrestricted act of understanding. The items within our experience are intelligible, but their intelligibility is restricted. A restricted intelligibility contains the answers to some questions about itself, but leaves some questions unanswered. Anything that does not contain within itself the answers to all questions about it is dependent for its existence on some more fundamental reality outside it.Spitzer again uses his argument against an infinite regress to show that there is an unconditioned. But now he can argue that because the unconditioned does not depend on anything else, it must contain within itself the answers to all questions about it. But that means it is unrestricted in its intelligibility, which is taken to mean that it is infinite. Thus the unconditioned is the content of an infinite act of understanding, and it directly becomes an infinite act of understanding itself. There is only one, since any question about the different instances of it would be unanswerable.This argument slips in many places. It also creates an inconsistency. Since the unconditioned must not have any properties that differ from those of the items it conditions, one wonders how an intelligent creator could have created unintelligent things in the world.Spitzer's argument does not prove the existence of God. It is made up of vague abstractions that morph into one another to create the appearance of an inference. At best, it is ingenious in the way it combines old arguments with odd interpretations of modern physics and eccentric mathematics. The basic idea that everything has conditions for its existence never becomes very clear. Conditions are assumed to fall into linear chains and get simpler and more powerful the farther back one goes, until finally God is reached. It is strange to place God at the end of a series of less and less specific realities. (I wonder what comes just before him.) Spitzer loses the reader in tangled verbiage and apparently loses himself too.

Thorough and great book.

This books deals with cosmology; astrophysics; quantum physics and philosophy in the reasoning for the existence of God or a super intelligence. I was able to hold my own until I reached the philosophy part of the book - where I could not grasp the author's philosophical reasoning as I just did not understand it My weakness not his.On the basis on the first three aspects I referred to I would recommend this book and leave you to draw you own conclusions from some very cogent reasoned arguments .

The beginning of the book can be hard going, delving deep into modern Cosmology and Physics. For those not of a scientific background, this portion of the book could require reading, and rereading just to make sure you follow the implications of the theories Spitzer is presenting. Followed by a great postscript that is however very technical, and can require a very close reading if you are not familiar with contemporary physics of Philosophy of Science.Then the Second Part: The Philosophical Arguments.The first Argument is a reframing of the well known Cosmological Argument of Aquinas and Aristotle. Abandoning the use of traditional and classical terminology (bar divine simplicity) throughout the argument (instead preferring conditioned and unconditioned realities), Spitzers crafts what is probably one of the best presentations of this argument I have read in recent scholarship. Coherent, concretely defined, and thoroughly argued. It's going to be VERY difficult to refute, after a few months attempting to find a hole in the argument I have remained unable. Simply fantastic.The Second argument I am still struggling with, however I haven't had time to return to it since mid-January. A reframing of Bernard Lonergans Proof of God in light of the first Philosophical Argument. I can't comment too much on the argument, as I am still figuring everything out within it- it is completely new to me, probably explaining my difficulties.The third Philosophical Argument is a defence of the Kalam Cosmological Argument in light of the previous two arguments. Going through the Philosophy of Time and a demonstration of the impossibility of an infinite regress of an actually existing dimension of the universe, through mathematics and Philosophy. Revealing an inherent contradiction with the notion of 'infinite past time'.After this is review of the Subject matter as a whole: and methodological concerns for Atheism. As 'There is no God' is as much of a knowledge claim as 'There is a God' the burden of proof does indeed fall on the Atheist in light of arguments presented in favour, and there appears to be no conceivable way that the premise of Atheism can be justified without begging the question. This is a very small section in light of the other parts, but necessary after the argument has finished. Especially in drawing attention to the methodologies of via negatio (Apophatic Theology) in understanding the concept of God as understood for Classical Theism.The next is the Transcendentals...I haven't actually worked through these yet, I was more interested in the Philosophical Arguments

Why take an abstract idea and make it more confusing with language. “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”Looking forward to the condensed version written in plain english.

Very heavy material, not for the average reader. It also gets dry, but I was fine with that. If you are reading physics already, then you might enjoy this book, but if you are looking for something more accessible possibly try C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity or Timothy Keller's Reason for God.