Sociological Arguments for the Existence of God

Andrew Lim

On the question of God's existence, we usually take the traditional route of ploughing through the classical arguments for the divine existence. They include the cosmological, ontological, teleological and moral arguments. These arguments continue to enjoy a measure of credibility and recent scholars like Swineburne, Plantinga and Craig have revisited them and given them a fresh cutting-edge.

I believe in the credibility of these classical arguments. But they put the post-modern person in a strange and unfamiliar territory. Consequently, I have chosen to approach the question of the existence of God from a standpoint which may gain a more ready hearing.

There are a number of phenomena common to our human experience which interestingly stack up to furnish what I would call a "sociological argument" for a case that God exists. These signals are not logical or philosophical proofs for God's existence. They are more like signposts. They point to the reasonableness of a belief in an existence of the transcendence.

I am indebted to the thoughts of Peter Berger and C.S. Lewis. Berger in his slim volume A Rumour of Angels speaks of what he calls "signals of transcendence" - indicators within the human experience that provoke us to think more seriously about the possibility of God's existence. Where Berger is concerned, "…a signal of transcendence is an experience in our everyday world that appears to point to a higher reality beyond…. The signal’s message is a double one: The experience is both a contradiction and a desire. It punctures the adequacy of what we once believed while also rousing in us a longing for something surer and richer." Lewis' approach is more subtle. His Surprised by Joy is encoded with a hidden logic that subtly yet compulsively persuades the human heart to behold the transcendent in the ordinary. But subtle as they may be, Lewis' own set of signals may be traced too.

Some twenty years after Berger wrote Rumour he held on to his theory. He wrote in A Far Glory: The Quest for Faith in an Age of Credulity: "God plays a game of hide and seek with mankind and leaves more than a few hints where he may be hiding".

What then are some of these signals of transcendence?

1. Our Propensity for Order

It would seem as if every human society has entrusted upon itself with the mandate of bringing about order and concord. Each human society seems to be plagued with this incurable need to provide its members with an orderly protective structure for existence. No human society seems capable of resting content with a perpetual raging state of chaos.

This is partly why humans surround their lives with rituals. These may be seen as human attempts to create some semblance of order for their lives. We surround the pivotal events of life such as a circumcision, a wedding, an anniversary, or a burial with rituals. We mark the passages of life with certain milestones in order that we might bring order out of the seeming messiness of human existence.

Deprived of such order, both society and the human individual become threatened with terror. Emile Durkheim refers to this terror as "anomie", which literally means "a state of orderlessness". It is interesting that the Bible translates this word as lawlessness, a state where God is not.

But from whence come this incurable urge to replace cacophony with symphony?

Berger tells us that throughout human history people have believed that the created order of society in some sense corresponded to an underlying order of a universe. Could it be that the divine order both supports and justifies all human attempts at ordering. Berger gives an example of a child waking up in the night from a bad dream, and surrounded by darkness, she cries for her mother. What does the mother do? She will do what any good mother will do. She will take the child, cradle her and reassure her saying: "Don't be afraid, everything is all right, everything is all right; all is well". Berger says that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that at this moment the mother is being invoked as a high priestess who has the power to banish the chaos and restore peace.

But from where does this propensity for order come? Science tells us the world is intelligible and delicately balanced. This stimulates a curious intellectual restlessness which prompts us to look for reasonable explanations. The central question we need to consider is: "Where does the ordering of the world come from?" Thus far, evolution has not been able to explain this ordering.

We believe that it serves as a "signal" that we were created for a world of ultimate order and peace - a place where the terror of chaos will be forever banished.


2. The Argument from Damnation

There are times when our sense of what is human permissible is so violently outraged, that the only adequate response to the offender seems to be a curse of some supernatural dimension. How do you feel watching Schindler's List, especially that part where the Nazi officer sat on an easy chair on a balcony, presumably after he had made love to a woman, and using a high-powered rifle, began taking pot-shots on whomever he fancied, putting a bullet through that person's head? You can't watch that without being deeply provoked.

Why do we feel such outrage in the face of evil?

Berger believes that there are deeds that are not just evil but monstrously evil. For such deeds, no human punishment would seem enough. They demand not only condemnation but damnation in the full religious sense of the word. The word "damn" has been worn threadbare in our time through casual overuse. Even Bugs Bunny cries out "Damn it!" when he drops a hammer on his toes. Consequently, we have come to lose the force of its meaning. But damnation is a biblical word. The Son of God was damned on our behalf. He did not merely deflect God's wrath from reaching us. He absorbed it into His own person and God damned him. 1

And there are crimes so inhuman that the perpetrator not only puts himself outside the community of human people, he actually invokes on his own head, a retribution far more severe than that which any human law-court can possibly dispense. Berger says that there are certain deeds that cry out to heaven. And deeds that cry out to heaven, cry out for hell.

It is most telling that such cries come from people of all cultures. We see images on TV of people from the whole spectrum of human cultures, in their miserable plight, looking up with anguish faces to the heavens, wringing their hands in hopelessness and calling for a justice that they will perhaps never get to see here on this earth.

This human capacity to be outraged against some extreme forms of evil is a powerful "signal", that there must be transcendent God out there to Whom your cry will reach; a Transcendent Being who alone can serve the ultimate justice that is shamelessly denied down here.

Is it too far fetched to construe of this “being” as the Transcendent Judge, the God Almighty? After all, the rhetorical question "Shall not the Judge of all men do right?" (Gen 18:25) has given many people a hope of a final vindication.


3. The Argument from Play

In the middle of our most exciting games, time seem to have vaporized. A hunter stalking his prey in dense bush does not see time as 10.30 a.m. which other working people do. In his hunt, he has been transported into a different time. To the athlete it is the last lap; to the actor it is the third act; to the girl playing hopscotch it is Square 8; to the lovers it is the last yet lingering embrace.

For each of these ones, time merges into eternity. For a time, all the cares in the world and any awareness of their progression towards inevitable death is forgotten. Often in play, the natural and the supernatural seemed to flow one into the other.

Of course you could look at it as a merciful distraction and it is partly that. But then again it could well be a signal that a transcendent realm awaits us and there in our carefree frolicking, time will stand still. We live in an era when work gets increasingly sterile and boring. Could our play not serve as a pointer to a spiritual realm where time finally fully merges with eternity.


4. The Argument from Humour

We have been told that in recent years, the two most influential theories on the phenomenon of humour, have been those propounded by Freud and Bergson.

They both observed that when we find some situation funny, there is always an element of "incongruity" in them. They assert that whenever you come across a comical situation you can usually trace an element of incongruity or incommensurability in it.

It is rather funny when a man in his formal executive suit and carrying a leather case slips over a banana peel and falls over. His posture is "incongruous" to with what we have come to expect of a man dressed that way. We least expect it. We expect him to be dignified but his legs are flailing all over.

But there is one fundamental incongruity from which all other comic discrepancies are derived - the incongruity between the human person and the universe. Isn't it the case that the whole human situation looks so amusingly incongruous. Destined to fly great heights, we are caged within bones and wrapped in skin and confined to this puny planet.

Could it not be the case, that in the final analysis, all comical situations reflect the ultimate comic - the imprisonment of the human spirit in the world. The human condition is both something to laugh at and something to cry over. It is a kind of a "tragi-comedy" that playwrights like Beckett and Ionesco of the "theatre of the absurd" movement have so eloquently portrayed. It has been pointed out over and over since classical antiquity, that comedy and tragedy are at root closely related.

If we find the human situation laughable, it could well be that we're not meant to be here.


5. The Argument from Dirty Jokes

I think it was Lewis who said that dirty jokes are almost entirely centered on two of the most "natural acts" human beings perform - the processes of "excretion" and "reproduction".

These are the two processes we share with the animals. Now that should make those acts something most natural. And yet the way we crack jokes about them betrays the fact that we treat them as though it were something most unnatural, even comical. Imagine a cow bashful about the need to excrete, or an enterprising tom-cat having sexual hang-ups!

Lewis astutely observes that in a subconscious way, coarse jokes express the discord we feel, as we find ourselves in a world we're not meant to be in. If we find those biological processes funny, could it be that it is incongruous that spiritual beings like us, made in the image of God, should be trapped and enveloped inside a shell of flesh. Endowed with nobility and grandeur and passion, we spend our time sitting in the outhouse. We may be meant for the heavens but the fact remains that we're very much down here engaging in activities that are terrible earthy!

And it is this "in-between state" that, unlike the animals, we seem unable to come to terms with. In that sense, coarse jokes are really an expression of a rumbling sense of discord we feel. The fact that dirty jokes are universally pervasive tells us that human people everywhere feel the same sense of dissonance.

And indeed we should feel the dissonance. It seems natural that we blush at the process of excretion and reproduction. They seem odd because they are indeed odd. We are after all immortals trapped in a mortal shell. The discomfort we feel is simply a reminder that we are not "at home" here. Lewis asks if fishes ever complain that the water is wet!. Dirty jokes may be another signal of the existence of the Transcendence.


6. The Commotion Surrounding Death

In the presence of death, we act even less "naturally". All the rest of the lower forms of the animal world seem to treat death as normal. But we humans treat it with something like shock or revulsion. Death may be universal, it may is pervasive and yet we never could get used to its reality.

We flinch from it. Even when we believe in the existence of an afterlife, we still seem obsessed with our ritualistic denial of death, no matter how it is expressed.

Ernest Becker in his book The Denial of Death tells us that modern Western culture is obsessed with its attempts at evading death. And when Woody Allen quips: "I'm not frightened of dying. I just don't want to be there when it happens", he may be camouflaging his own uneasiness over it by a layer of humour.

But really, we should not be too hard on ourselves for treating death with revulsion. We find death unnatural for death IS unnatural. We were created to live and not to die. The theme song for Fame has a line in its chorus that says "I want to live forever".

Little wonder why part of the seduction of humanity is linked with the false hope of immortality: "Erut sicut dei"- "You will not die. You will be like God" Gen 3:5. We all yearn for immortality. The trauma of impermanence is unbearable.

When all is said, death is an oddity. And our revulsion over it may be a "signal of transcendence" to remind us that this cannot be the end. And when so many people die with all that music still thumping on their breast, you quietly ponder if indeed there is a realm, where death is not keyed into life’s equation.


7. Existential Dread and Loneliness

Closely related to the commotion we make surrounding death we see the dread modern people feel. The Germans called this "angst". There seems to have been a basic flaw in human existence

When you stand before the wreck of some ancient civilization, now long buried and forgotten, you wonder what purposed was served by the mammoth labours of the millions of people who toiled over it. And I'm sure you've wondered if after 50 years, anyone will care about anything you've done or even know that you existed. After only a few generations most gravestones lie forgotten. Knowing that the stubby insignificant pencil on your desk will outlast you brings an existential dread to some people!

The "theatre of the Absurd" had such spokespersons as Beckett, Pinter and Ionesco who were plagued by the sheer absurdity of the impermanence of the human person and they expressed that in their writings. George Santayana sums up the despair of the human situation by this daring pronouncement that "there is no cure for birth or death, except to enjoy the interval". We find ourselves wanting more of life than we find it. As Aldous Huxley once said: "There comes a time when one says, even of Shakespeare, even of Beethoven, 'Is that all?'".

Have you ever experienced the feeling that here on earth, we are never truly happy, even when we have deep experiences love and beauty? Have you never experienced such great happiness that your tears flow? Why is that? Surely happiness and tears do not go together! What seems to be happening here? Could it be that in those moments of happiness, someone comes up from behind you and he says to you: "Even this will have to go". Even in the midst of the fragrance of life, there is a stench of death. And we begin to suspect that all this is far too wonderful to be true, and we cry. We seem to silently crave for a land where love lasts forever.

Our modern anxiety is rooted in the absence of the presence of God. God has come to be the "dei absconditus", the absentee God, whose presence we loath but whose absence we cannot bear. Could it not be that this modern spirit of dread and loneliness, even in the midst of love and beauty, is another signal of a existence of the Transcendence, which alone can satisfy the longing of the human heart.


8. Our Startled Reaction to the Flow of Time

Lewis made the observation that we humans find it hard to reconcile with the flow of time, so much so that we are astonished by it. When an aunt opens the door and sees a nephew she hadn't see in years, she usually says: "O how he's grown !!", as though something so natural and universal were again and again a novelty. Lewis writes: "It is as strange as if the fish were repeatedly surprised at the wetness of water. And that would be strange indeed unless of course the fish were destined to become one day a land animal"

And if we are repeatedly so ill-inclined to be reconciled to the flow of time, could it be that we were not made for time, but for eternity. Another "signal"?


9. The Experience of the "Ought"

Regardless of culture, colour or creed, a sense of ethics and morality is fundamental and pervasive to the human experience. Lewis asks us to imagine a country where every person felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. Imagine a society in which this behaviour is consistently and unconditionally thought of as being a virtue. It would be sheer anarchy.

Mention the name Adolf Hitler, and pervasively all over the world everyone says he ought not to have done what he did. But why not? If Hitler is guilty, before what tribunal is he guilty? Why is it that this annoying "ought" keeps cropping up? What is this "oughtness" really about? Some call it "ethics", others "morality" or even "common human decency".

Basically people know what is right and wrong. Otherwise, why would we say things like: "Why did you do that to him? What has he done to you?" Basically, when people argue, they are making an unconscious appeal to some commonly agreed moral standards. When people argue about moral issues, they do so on the assumption that there is an unspoken agreement about what is right and wrong.

There seems to be a core of moral constants underlying the human race. It looks like the standard of right and justice we appeal to is not simply a description of how people behave, so much as a prescription of how people ought to behave. Someone has said that morality is not simply a cold law of nature like gravity. It doesn't describe how things happen. It prescribes for us how things ought to happen. We know innately, that we ought to be kind, good, honest and truthful; and that we ought not to be unkind, selfish, dishonest and deceptive. It would appear that we didn't invent these norms. We merely discover them. Could this universally pervasive phenomenon be a "signal" pointing to the existence of a God in whom all righteousness and justice reside and issue so that we may be without excuse? 2

Conclusion

We have explored some of the universally pervasive "signals" that seem to point to the existence of a transcendent being. The onus lies on the one rejecting this interpretation to present one more soul-satisfying than this.

One writer writes: "I have found these arguments for the persistence of transcendence to be more intriguing and credible than any theological or philosophical arguments for God."

I close with the words Brooke Fraser wrote in her C.S. Lewis Song (Album Version):

If I find in myself desires nothing in this world can satisfy
I can only conclude that I was not made for here
If the flesh that I fight is at best only light and momentary
Then of course I'll feel nude when to where I'm destined I'm compared

Speak to me in the light of the dawn
Mercy comes with the morning
I will sigh and with all creation groan
As I wait for hope to come for me

Am I lost or just less found,
On the straight or on the roundabout of the wrong way?
Is this a soul that stirs in me,
Is it breaking free, wanting to come alive?

`Cause my comfort would prefer for me to be numb
And avoid the impending birth
Of who I was born to become

1. Calvin rightly said that the cry of dereliction is the best commentary to the statement in the Creed that says: "He descended into hell". John Duncan, divinity professor in Edinburgh, Scotland, once asked: "Do you know what it means to be forsaken by the Father?. It is damnation". In Galatians 3:13 the apostle Paul made it clear with these words: "Christ saved us from the curse of the law by Himself becoming a curse for us'" It is a quotation from Deuteronomy 21 where it reads "Cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree". Jesus had to be damned in order for us to be saved.

2. This 'signal" is perhaps the one most counteracted against. And many have tried to explain it away. Some say that our sense of right and wrong is a product of our own cultural upbringing. But if that is true, a number of problems arise. One, how come there are such strong similarities between what people regard as right and wrong between cultures. Two, if cultural norm is the final order of the day, why is it that we cannot help but make judgments that some cultural practices are deficient. Why do we decry the practice of child-sacrifice in some cultures or the practice of female genital mutilation in another? And when we do this we seem to be appealing to what we believe is a "higher" sense of right and wrong. But when we are morally critical of any aspect of other people's culture, we have made a tacit agreement that there is an overarching standard that is higher than our own peculiar local cultural norms.

Other people argue that ethics and morality are simply a kind of social contract. In societies where people care only for themselves, life is "nasty, short and brutish". And so to preserve ourselves, we invent such norms as would go to protect us, what is called the "social contract theory". But this is not ultimately an adequate view. For it says that I should be moral because in the long haul I would be better off embracing that policy.

But this view is met with an immediate problem. The selfish part of us will prompt us to say that just because all of us as a group will be better off if we're all moral, it does not follow from this that I, as an individual, will be better off. Would it not be the case that I might be better off as an individual, if while everyone acts morally, for me, just on the selective occasions, especially when I'm not likely to be caught, disregard morality, and simply do what will benefit me most? After all, in reality, many live quite happily by this so-called "free-rider" attitude to life. And frequently their consciences do not prick them. So long as there are enough people recycle their plastic bottles and tin-cans, then my negligence to be environmentally responsible, will not hurt planet earth too adversely.

But the moment you argue that the free-rider is morally wrong, then you are affirming the fact that morality has a deeper foundation than mere self-interest. It simply does not appear that the social contract view is rigorous and durable enough to be the bedrock of morality. Furthermore, isn't it the case, that the basic underlying moral principle that we ought to keep the contract, is in the first place presupposed by any such contract. But if no such Moral Being exists, then this nagging sense of "oughtness" is indeed a strange inexplicable brute fact.

Does it not seem more natural to conclude that this universal experience of "oughtness" reveals that the Transcendence that lies behind the universe, is a Moral Being. And consequently, in the light of this sense of "oughtness", surely belief in God is not unreasonable.