by Philip Goff, professor in philosophy at Durham University, UK
Neither atheism nor theism adequately explains reality. That is why we must consider the middle ground between the two
I was raised religiously, although the Catholicism of my parents was more about getting the community together than accepting dogmas. From an early age, the secular world all around me was much more of an influence than Sunday school, and by the age of 14 I self-identified as an atheist. It never occurred to me that there was a credible option between these identities: the religious and the secular. Of course, I was aware of the ‘spiritual but not religious’ category, but I was socialised to think this option was unserious and essentially ‘fluffy thinking’. And thus I remained a happy atheist for the next 25 years.
This all changed a mere five years ago when I arrived as a faculty member at Durham University, where I was asked to teach philosophy of religion. It was a standard undergraduate course: you teach the arguments against God, and you teach the arguments for God, and then the students are invited to decide which case was stronger and write an essay accordingly. So I taught the arguments against God, based on the difficulty of reconciling the existence of a loving and all-powerful God with the terrible suffering we find in the world. As previously, I found them incredibly compelling and was reconfirmed in my conviction that there is almost certainly no God. Then I taught the arguments for God’s existence. To my surprise, I found them incredibly compelling too! In particular, the argument from the fine-tuning of physics for life couldn’t be responded to as easily as I had previously thought (more on this below).
This left me in quite a pickle. For me, philosophy isn’t just an abstract exercise. I live out my worldview, and so I find it unsettling when I don’t know what my worldview is. Fundamentally, I want the truth, and so I don’t mind changing my mind if the evidence changes. But here I was with seemingly compelling evidence pointed in two opposing directions! I lost a lot of sleep during this time.
A few weeks into this existential morass I was peacefully watching some ducks quack in a nearby nature reserve, when I suddenly realised there was a startingly simple and obvious solution to my dilemma. The two arguments I was finding compelling – the fine-tuning argument for ‘God’, and the argument from evil and suffering against ‘God’ – were not actually opposed to each other. The argument from evil and suffering targets a very specific kind of God, namely the Omni-God: all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly good creator of the universe. Meanwhile, the fine-tuning argument supports something much more generic, some kind of cosmic purpose or goal-directedness towards life that might not be attached to a supernatural designer. So if you go for cosmic purpose but not one rooted in the desires of an Omni-God, then you can have your cake and eat it by accepting both arguments.
And thus my worldview was radically changed.
https://aeon.co/essays/why-our-universe-can-have-cosmic-purpose-without-god
Know Thyself 