Today I am talking about God. Since I have too much to say about that topic, I will have to make this Part 1 of 3. Today I am talking about one particular question: Can we even know that God is real? A further question to ask is whether we can be confident in which God supposedly is real? How are we to even approach this question? How are religious believers and secular skeptics and doubters to have a discussion about this? Is real dialogue possible? The list goes on and on. In order to be fair and not be explicit on my position about the question of whether we can know that God is real, I will list up to five different ways of answering the question in no particular order.

Before I begin, I need to clarify some things. First, I do not pretend to have given a complete list of different ways people think about the question of God's existence. Second, I am assuming that you believe the question of whether God exists is a very important one. In fact, I am going to be a bit bold here for a second. If you either aren't interested in the question of God's existence or don't think it matters, then I think you have a serious problem. The question of whether God is real is even more important than caring about your physical health. The question of God impacts your views about people, ethics, what happens after death, how you relate to people, what you depend on for ultimate joy and satisfaction, and so on.

I might even venture to say that a lack of interest in the question of God or apathy about God's existence is probably the result of ignorance or lack of knowledge on the matter. People will oftentimes say that something is not that important or is just all opinion when they really do not know what they're talking about. It is kind of like when people say that a scientific theory is "just a theory" as if it's nothing more than a hunch or smart guess. Nothing could be further from the truth.

As one thinker once put it, the question of knowing whether God is real or not is like whether a surgeon knows where the heart is located in order to perform open heart surgery as opposed to whether a gardener is aware of the different weeds in his garden that look like other flowers.

So, can God be known to exist? There are possibly five different ways of thinking about this and I will mention each of them briefly. Some of these will come from those who identify as atheist or agnostic and some will be Christian. It should go without saying that there are critics for each of these views. So here we go...

1. "Is God real?" is a meaningless question.

The main idea here is that to even ask the very question of whether God is real or not is a mistake. Why would this be a mistake? Because the person assumes that there is an answer to it. Well, if the question is not even intelligible in the first place, then how could anyone figure out the question's answer? There was a school of thought known as logical positivism that thrived in the early to mid 1900s that wanted to elevate the status of scientific reasoning. There was a principle that stated that if a statement was meaningful (had actual factual or logical content to it), then it had to be capable of being empirically verified or confirmed. If some claim could not in principle be empirically verified, then it was not really a statement but just gibberish. So, for some people this might be the way they think about the question of God.

2. Yes in principle, but probably not.

Christianity for centuries had figures who believed that one could offer reason-based arguments for believing that God is real from Justin Martyr, Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Anselm of Canterbury, William Paley, Robin Collins, Paul Copan, Mark Linville, William Lane Craig, J.P. Moreland, Alexander Pruss, Timothy McGrew and so on. Then again, Christians have had their fair share of critics from the Enlightenment - David Hume, Voltaire, Immanuel Kant - as well as modern day and deceased critics such as Kai Nielsen, J.L. Mackie, Graham Oppy, J.L. Schellenberg, Bertrand Russell, Michael Tooley, Peter Singer, Michael Ruse and so on.

Critics of rational and evidence-based arguments do not affirm that God exists because they are not convinced from arguments from cosmology (Craig, Aquinas), design (Paley, Collins), and morality (Copan, Linville) just to name a few. There are a wide variety of reasons for why they are not convinced that I cannot go into here. The point is that while these critics do believe that religious believers can offer evidence and arguments for their views, at the end of the day they are not persuaded that the appropriate level of evidence has come through.

3. Yes through argument and evidence.

Many religious believers have offered rational arguments in support of Christianity from Thomas Aquinas, Anselm of Canterbury, William Paley, Alvin Plantinga, William Lane Craig, J.P. Moreland, Paul Copan, Francis J. Beckwith, Peter Van Inwagen, Francis Collins, Robin Collins, Victor Reppert, and so forth. Not everyone on this list had the same way of presenting evidence for God. Some were more empirical (Aquinas, Collins, Craig), conceptual (Anselm, Reppert) and historical (Paley, McGrew). While none of these folks believed that any argument could provide undeniable proof (e.g. 2+2=4) of some claim, they still believed the arguments were decently strong enough to justify one's belief in God.

4. Yes, but no argument is needed.

Within the last few decades, there have been some Christians who have said that believing that God is real might be justified even if the believer cannot give an independent reason for that belief. It would be akin to you believing the following things and having a good reason even though you cannot give a non-circular argument for believing them: (1) You had cereal for breakfast this morning. (2) There are other minds in the world other than yours that exist. (3) The physical world outside your mind is real. (4) The past has existed longer than five minutes, and so forth. The idea here is that it is impossible to prove any of these beliefs as true by some argument that would already assume the conclusion was true.

Alvin Plantinga who retired from the University of Notre Dame championed this idea. He basically argued that it is possible that believing that God exists is on par with the 4 beliefs above I just mentioned. As I said in the beginning, there are critics of this view from secular minds as well as within Christianity.

So can we know that God is real? What do you think? Where on this list do you think you stand and could you explain it to someone else?

For further resources:

Focuses on arguments from Aristotle to Leibniz

Focuses on whether religious belief in God needs argument or not

William Lane Craig presents traditional arguments as well as a defense for the resurrection of Jesus

Atheist J.L. Mackie critiques religious arguments

Graham Oppy surveys many arguments for and against God's existence

Collection of essays by different scholars defending traditional arguments