the 1933 Oxford English Dictionary’s definition I.1:
That which makes good or proves a statement; evidence sufficient (or contributing) to establish a fact or produce belief in the certainty of something.
And more. With every “that which makes good” comes a story, a test, a sojourn. Like a baker’s proof, it forces one to grow a little, and, like a printer’s, it won’t always come out right the first time. Like the distiller’s, it can be exhilarating. We can only hope that our proofs, like a good jacket, will hold up on rainy days.
The search for proofs of God’s existence is its own genre, winding through history and sprouting capricious branches. Like any genre, from impressionist painting to romance novels, proof has never spoken for any whole society. It’s rarely anyone’s sole occupation, but still it has occupied some of history’s most brilliant men.
I do mean men. As it happens, the genre comes to us through history as almost entirely an undertaking of men, making this story, by implication, a study of masculinity. It’s a story of what a communion mostly of male minds has fashioned through this ongoing conversation over thousands of years, with their arguments speaking to each other more than to those around them, but more to those around them than they realize. It’s also about what ideas they, thanks to whom they exclude, leave out.
These men have had big ambitions for their proofs. Plato thought that proofs of the gods might finally set his society right, that he could reform criminals just by reciting them. Ibn Tufayl, a Muslim in medieval Spain, imagined a proof powerful enough to soothe away the will to live. The Jewish heretic Spinoza turned a venerable proof for God into one for an apparently godless universe. Descartes and Leibniz intended their proofs to heal the rift that the Reformation had driven through Europe. And the genre continues today, as much as ever, if not more. In Turkey, I met a man trying to bring peace to the Middle East through proofs of divine beauty in nature. I’ve spent weeks driving around the suburbs of Southern California, from storefront to storefront, visiting organizations that promulgate one proof or another. I’ve attended classes by William Lane Craig, God’s most fearsome advocate on today’s debating circuit, and sat down with his archnemesis, Richard Dawkins. They’re all out to rejigger the world and themselves and us in the process.
So how exactly is it that some people think that they can prove God exists, or doesn’t, and why do others fall short? How did ancient arguments transform into an outgrowth of the culture wars? Why is it that for some of us everything depends on these proofs, while for others they’re completely beside the point? These questions of we then throw themselves back on me again. I’ve had to think about abstractions and my own very real life in tandem.
The proofs show up in textbook after textbook, torn away from the flesh from which they came.2 They’re taught, argued about, and forgotten, sometimes saving a person’s particular faith, sometimes eroding it, and usually neither. There’s no surer way of knowing than proof, by definition, and it’s hard to imagine any more enticing knowledge than that of a God. Still, the world goes on in disagreement, in belief and unbelieving, with so many forms of each. Some few keep up the search for proof of a God, and for the hallelujahs that would surely come from finding one. While tracing their steps, though, I keep getting stuck trying to figure what God we’re talking about, what existence might mean, and what, exactly, we expect from a proof. My own proof has never become much more than a possibility and an expectation, but that hasn’t kept it from commandeering my life.
ONE
First Causes
ANCIENT TIMES AND REASONABLE MEASURES
The first time I remember thinking about proofs for the existence of God was when I was seventeen, thanks to a book I came across at my friend Corinne’s house. It was muddy green and fairly large—an encyclopedic, spirited compendium of things about which one should know. The proofs took up no more than a couple of pages, and they weren’t cast in an especially favorable light. They were more like a centuries-old joke, actually, a joke that one should be prepared for just in case anyone ever tries passing them off as anything other than that. One should be ready for the punch line.
The book listed and summarized three proofs, each hiding behind impressive names: ontological, cosmological, teleological—having to do with being, world, and purpose. I instantly became attached to it and went about dropping hints to Corinne that it would the perfect present for my upcoming birthday. But the message didn’t seem to get through. Why would it? How could she guess what effect it was having on me? How could she know what those proofs felt like in my head?
I had spent my childhood watching my parents as they did their own experiments with, if not proof, truth. As they went about the business of seeking, I followed, tiptoeing through rooms full of meditators and testing my aptitude—low, it turns out—for extrasensory perception. My mother, especially, sought out teachers and books, and there was an ongoing procession of diet regimes. These experiments could involve some reference to God, but it was a God of the vaguest sort, whose name my parents were sure to pass over quickly so as not to confuse it with the Jewish and Christian deities that they had learned, and disavowed, before I was born.
The premise from the start was that I should choose what to believe about religious things, since they were still choosing for themselves. For an only child this was bound to be a lonely task, but I took to it early on. I would ask to go to synagogue with friends, and deploy parables of the Buddha during fights on the playground. One can only experiment so much though. “There are years that ask questions,” Zora Neale Hurston wrote in passing, “and years that answer.”1 By the time Corinne’s book came around, a need was gnawing in me for answers, and no answer seemed more satisfying than a proof.
Philosophy, when it takes hold of a teenager, means taking oneself very seriously on matters of gross incompetence. There are no minor leagues, no lower gears; one goes straight from zero to everything in no time, and the most alluring stuff is exactly the most fundamental and the most lofty, just when one is least prepared to take any of it with a grain of salt. Even so, and consequently, there’s no better time than adolescence to fall in love with philosophy, or to develop an intellectual dependency on it. Neither love nor addiction occurs when one is being sensible. They thrive on heroic feats of self-delusion and clever rationalization, and so does philosophy.
Causes, though, can be a trickster. What causes what? How and why? What really caused me to care about these proofs so much, and where did the proofs come from in the first place? Talking about the cause of anything is harder than you might think.
It’s conventional, in this case, to start with the Greeks. I wish I could do otherwise, for originality’s sake. But while those-ological terms I came across were a later invention, their etymology is Greek, and for good reason. Without exactly meaning to, the ancient Greeks were the ones who caused the whole story of proofs to happen, or at least to happen the way it did.
The kind of Greek religion I had been briefly obsessed with in fifth grade had no place for proofs—the myths, the temples, the heroes, the cavorting. People had reasons for believing in the gods of Mount Olympus other than proofs. Homer’s verses of deities and warrior-kings uniting in the siege against Troy reminded the disparate Greek city-states of what they had in common. Hesiod’s tales told lessons about morality and economy, together with answers to questions about the universe, and one could repeat them to seduce a lover or to scold a misbehaving child. The public sacrifices made to these gods were carefully orchestrated affairs, and the role one played in them reflected one’s position in society.2 The gods were real—or else. And while public ritual served politics and epic myths made for literature, so-called mystery cults allowed people to go deeper. There were illustrations in the books I read as a kid of people gathered in caves or dark rooms, conducting rituals and repeating secret doctrines said to have been conferred by a patron god. These mystery cults provided transformative experiences. Through them, ancient Greeks knew that esoteric knowledge can have spiritual power.
Then, around the middle of the first millennium B.C.E., a new batch of sages, students, and charlatans appeared, many from the Greek colonies