The Intelligibility Argument for God

The first of a series of essays on my conversion, starting with the biggest scalp there is: why the God of classical theism is unavoidable and inevitable and modern secular atheism logically fails

In primary school, there was a pre-internet meme that floated around every year called ‘opposite day’. The basic premise was that everything you said on opposite day meant the opposite of it’s usual day-to-day meaning. For example if you were wearing a white t-shirt, I would say that my t-shirt is ‘black’ and this would mean white instead. Generally speaking, opposite day was an opportunity to say some pretty cut throat things that you wouldn’t normally get away with like telling someone “you’re really smart and hot”, implying they are both stupid and ugly. But my own philosophical questions went further on opposite day - I tried to push the logic of the inversion to it’s limits and came up with an opposite day theory.

The theory was that on every opposite day, if everything was supposed to be its opposite, and you applied that logic to opposite day itself then even opposite day would be it’s opposite on opposite day? And the opposite of opposite day is a normal day? And therefore you couldn’t really have an opposite day on opposite day - if you were really serious about opposite day, you would have the opposite of an opposite day on opposite day, which was a normal day!

As much as my classmates found this opposite day theory amusing, there was a deeper point present which relates to some thoughts on the nature of truth and classical theism which I discussed in recent podcasts with DC Schindler and Mathew David Seegall, Footnotes2Plato and which will be the topic of this essay. The topic is to articulate an insight from DC Schindler’s book “Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason” which is that the God of classical theism is the unavoidable basis of reason, rationality and logic.

The Self-defeating nature of Ultimate Skepticism

“There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.”- Friedrich Nietzsche

Ultimate skepticism, or even just regular less ultimate skepticism, is rampant at the moment. Skepticism might be the defining feature of the modern era which we have been in (emphasis on the past tense). The Enlightenment turned human reason and critique on everything, questioning all established dogma’s and assumptions (except its own). The most extreme version of this critique is what is called ‘Ultimate skepticism’: the philosophical position that all truth and knowledge are impossible. Whatever it is about humans, we live in a completely illusory bubble, with no point of contact with anything that is real at all…

There are many versions of this ultimate skepticism floating around: Descartes thought experiment of an evil demon that intentionally deceives him about everything he perceives and believes, or something more sci-fi like the Matrix in which we live in a contrived simulation but with no hope of escape. There is also a modern cognitive scientific version in Donald Hoffman’s argument that sense perception evolved for survival and reproduction rather than anything objectively real - therefore our perceptions are like a virtual reality headset, deeply functional, but illusory. Even just the garden variety 21st century post-modern garbage idea that we are “post-truth”, that the media landscape has made aspiring to anything that is actually real impossible and we live in a never ending hall of mirrors (yawn). Truth and hence reality has taken a real battering in the modern era!

The obvious flaw in ultimate skepticism is that it is self-defeating. In other words, if you could conclusively prove that human beings are incapable of truth and knowledge and that actually is the case, then you would know something that is true, and hence ultimate skepticism would be false. Therefore if ultimate skepticism is true, then it is false! Any firm ultimate skepticism is self-contradictory and self-defeating, because you are claiming to have true knowledge of our inability to have true knowledge…So ultimate skepticism is not a viable, logical or serious philosophical position.

In summary, if you argue for ultimate skepticism, you undermine your own capacity to make arguments in the first place. Ultimate skepticism, like opposite day, is an interesting thought experiment for philosopher’s to ponder but when taken seriously as a philosophical position you are sawing off the branch you are sitting on. In making any argument, hidden beneath arguments as such, is an assumption that the human mind is capable of grasping truth, and it is this fundamental assumption, what Plato calls The Good, which we will turn to in the next section.

The Self-affirming nature of The Good

(this section is based on my interpretation of DC Schindler’s argument in Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason - I highly recommend checking out his argument in the book itself in case I butcher it)

"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible." - Albert Einstein

Plato defines The Good as the “unhypothetical first principle of everything” (508d). The Good is a transcendent reality “beyond being“ (509) that renders the world intelligible or comprehensible to the human mind. The Good has a three-fold nature for Plato as (1) the goal of all human action (ethics), (2) the foundation of truth and knowledge (epistemology) and (3) the nature of ultimate reality (Ontological). For the purposes of this argument we will only be focusing on the (2) and (3) part of the nature of The Good as the foundation of truth and knowledge and the nature of ultimate reality and ignoring the moral function.

The Good is really the solution to truth and moral relativism which Plato is fighting against in the Sophists in the Republic who believe “man is the measure of all things”. For Plato, The Good is the measure of all things, a ‘third’ supra-individual measurement which determines the truth or falsity of our subjective judgements (504c). The good addresses the central problem of the republic raised in book 1 & 2 of truth and moral relativism because The Good: “(1) gives truth to the things known and (2) power to know to the knower” (508d).

How are we to make sense of all this? I don’t want the significance of the Good to get lost in the overly philosophical language. For the purpose of the current argument, we can understand The Good as the rational order of the cosmos and the rational nature of our mind that is capable of grasping that order! In other words, The Good is the guarantor of the connection between our minds and reality, which Einstein found so mysterious. Veraeke describes The Good as “the continually held promise of the wedding of intelligibility and reality”; the marriage of logos (intelligibility) and ontos (existence).

What is significant to our current discussion is that all arguments pre-suppose the existence of The Good: a correspondence between mind and reality and therefore that reality is intelligible to us and so we can know truth from non-truth, illusion from reality. The problem is though you can’t argue for the Good itself because all arguments pre-suppose The Good already exists and hence the logic of your argument would be circular ( a logical fallacy where the conclusion of an argument is based on the same premise that the argument is trying to prove)!

This is a real problem for human reasoning because as DC Schindler write’s in Plato’s Critique of Impure reason: ‘what reason can you give for reason?’ What rational argument can you give for rational arguments?’ We could extend this problem even further, what logical deduction can you give to prove deductive logic? What evidence can you provide for the validity of evidence? Reason, rationality, logic, evidence, must assume a correspondence between mind and reality but which they cannot prove without falling into circularity. The assumption of a correspondence between mind and reality underlies all arguments but cannot be proven by any argument!

So we are in a funny position, we can’t argue for the Good because the arguments are circular (any arguments for the Good already imply the existence of The Good to validate them)? But you also can’t argue against the Good because, like in ultimate skepticism, if your argument is right and the Good does not exist, then arguments themselves are not possible and your argument is false! In other words, if the Good does not exist and you are right about that, then arguments are impossible and your argument is then false. Here the problem get’s even worse, or better, depending on your perspective. As a former atheist for me this was getting worse, because you can’t disprove or prove the Good because it is the basis for all disproving and proving? You simply have to assume the existence of the Good to make arguments at all or else fall into logical contradiction!

For any skeptics out there, there is a nice reversal we can employ to prove the existence of The good or at least buttress your confidence in it’s underlying support for the connection between mind and reality. Because The Good is the guarantor of truth and knowledge technically anything that we can know to be true or false, prove or disprove, is evidence for the existence of The Good, a correspondence between mind and reality. So from 1+1 = 2, the sky is blue, knowing your own name, if you can know one thing to be true this is evidence for the existence of The Good, an underlying correspondence between mind and reality.

And here’s the kicker - if you followed my previous argument: if ultimate skepticism is true then it is false, therefore even ultimate skepticism itself points to the existence of the Good. In other words, even complete denial and doubt in the existence of Good, if truly the case, is evidence that The Good exists. As far as I’m concerned, this is game over - everything we know or do not know, even arguments against truth and knowledge themselves, point toward the existence of the Good, and as DC Schindler said “What Plato calls the Good, is what Christians mean by God”!

Conclusion

“The knowledge of God is a mountain steep indeed and difficult to climb–the majority of people scarcely reach its base” - St Gregory of Nyessa

People always ask me since becoming a Catholic: ‘Do I believe in God? Do I think God is real?’And I always think of this incredibly long and complicated argument about truth and knowledge and the unavoidable inevitability of The Good, God, and sigh before failing miserably to articulate it. It’s impossible to describe this argument in a few pithy sentences, but then why would the knowledge of God, ultimate reality, come at such a cheap price?

I’ve road tested this idea for many years (and was still sort of an atheist when I first met it!) and simply can’t find a way out, bar becoming some kind of self-contradictory, self-deceptive post-modernist liar. Underneath all arguments is the assumption of a rational order to the cosmos and that our minds are shaped like that rational order to grasp it (maybe even in it’s image…). When you push the logic to it’s extreme, even arguments against truth and knowledge are evidence for the existence of The Good, therefore even arguments against God point to the existence of God - we’re screwed!

It’s been one of the profound experiences of my life to go far enough in philosophy to see this stunning reversal and how unavoidable and inevitable the god of classical theism if you want to hold onto reason and rationality and evidence and logic and all that other good stuff we need for separating illusion from reality.

The West made a big mistake in trying to sever the existence of God from the intellectual pursuit of truth and knowledge. One which collapses when pushed to extremes and is responsible for our basic inability to make sense and form cohesive societies anymore. The great irony of modernity is that in getting rid of God to become more reasonable and rational, we made reason and rationality impossible. In getting rid of God to pursue truth and knowledge, we under-cut the foundations of both. I for one am sorry for my own participation in this grown-up game of make believe. Truth and knowledge without the underlying assumption of a shared reality, God, is like a game of opposite day, a fun thought-experiment, but one which leads to a dangerous detachment between reason and reality when taken seriously.