N. T. Wright and Arguments for the Existence of God

A Weakness in History and Eschatology

(avg. read time: 5–11 mins.)

I have noted on multiple occasions, and it is evident from some of my more footnoted posts, how N. T. Wright has been a major influence for me. I have read more of his works than I have anyone else’s, and that even includes J. R. R. Tolkien. I have developed more disagreements with his works over the years, but I still find much, much more that I appreciate. A few years ago, Baylor University Press put out a published version of his 2018 Gifford Lectures, which shares a title (but not a subtitle) with Rudolf Bultmann’s contributions to this lecture series long ago: History and Eschatology: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology. This is not going to be a review of that book, but I strongly recommend it if you want a sample of Wright’s work as a scholar that is more academically rigorous than his popular books (my favorite of which is probably still Surprised by Hope) but is less extensive than his Christian Origins and the Question of God series. It well exemplifies what makes Wright a good writer as well as a fascinating and creative scholar, while it also exemplifies some of his recurring issues.

However, there is one area I want to focus on today where Wright and I are not on the same page. I was especially interested in this volume because I wanted to see how he might integrate elements of philosophy from the likes of older thinkers like Thomas Aquinas or more recent thinkers like Alvin Plantinga into the discussion on natural theology.¹ In particular, I wanted to see how he might integrate arguments for the existence of God and the inferences drawn therefrom. But while Wright had plenty of interesting things to say on the matter of natural theology, these ideas were not among them. His engagement with major arguments for God’s existence leaves much to be desired.

Wright’s own preference is to work from the seven vocational signposts of human life, those being justice, beauty, freedom, truth, power, spirituality, and relationships (226–48). He writes of how these are transcendent signposts, but they are broken ones as well, as they do not point us to God in some unmediated fashion. This notion of broken signposts is a way of taking seriously the effects of the Fall, including noetic effects. But his comments on the major arguments for God’s existence that have already been more extensively articulated and defended elsewhere are rather sparse and misguided.

First, all that he says about “the” cosmological argument is that it “proposes that the existence of the world points to a Creator” (219). That is, at base, the notion behind the various cosmological arguments. I have put scare quotes around “the” in the first sentence because there are, in fact, several cosmological arguments. The most famous is probably the kalam cosmological argument as expounded and defended by William Lane Craig in many places, which can be summarized as follows:

P1) Everything that begins to exist has a cause for its existence.

P2) The universe began to exist.

C) Therefore, the universe has a cause for its existence.

But there have been updated versions of this argument, such as that from Andrew Loke, and there are different approaches to cosmological arguments altogether that do not assume that the universe began to exist. Rather, they rely on considerations of causality and ontology. While the kalam and variants of the same are “horizontal” cosmological arguments dependent on the idea of a finite past, “vertical” cosmological arguments point not only to causation in the past, but also causation for continued existence in the present. This latter kind of approach is represented by those like Thomas Aquinas in his presentation of the “Five Ways” and Mortimer Adler in his book How to Think About God (written a few years before he became a Christian).

As Wright notes, there is no real analogue for this kind of argument in the Bible, as the closest resemblance one might find is a text like Ps 19. But I cannot say I understand what the problem is supposed to be here. After all, David is not writing to address the questions that cosmological arguments address, nor is he responding to those who question whether or not any god exists. He writes as one with faith to a community of the faithful who already take it for granted that the one they know as God is.

Second, Wright similarly glides quickly past “the” teleological argument. He simply summarizes “it” as an approach which, “looking at ‘design’ in the world and inferring a Designer, has to do with the purpose or goal of creation” (220). He rightly observes that the Scriptures are more interested in eschatological telos and how this is signified by institutions like the temple, the Sabbath, and so on. Still, he insists that this be distinguished from how “modern versions of ‘natural theology’ have tried to make that argument ‘work’ within a framework which explicitly excludes the possibility of a worldview other than that of Western modernity—particularly the worldview brough to birth in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead” (220).

Again, there is no singular “the” when it comes to teleological arguments. Most are familiar with something like William Paley’s watchmaker analogy, where the complexity of design for something like a watch implies the existence of the watchmaker, and so the inference is that our universe, which shows many more marks of design of complexity far exceeding a watch, suggests a Creator. One might formulate such an argument as follows:

P1) There exists a highly complex order, structure, and beauty in the universe.

P2) These came to exist by random chance or the design of a purposeful mind.

P3) It is far too improbable to attribute such a complex order, structure and beauty to random chance.

C) The highly complex order, structure, and beauty in this universe are the result of the design of a purposeful mind.

This argument has been further developed in reference to the “fine-tuning” of the universe. Besides all the biological and chemical realia to which one might point, a particularly popular appeal is to the physical constants of the universe, without which we living beings or so many other things in our universe could not exist if they were not so precisely calibrated. One could formulate such an argument as follows:

P1) There are certain physical constants in this universe (and in this part of the universe particularly) that require a delicate balance (fine-tuning) for life to exist.

P2) These finely tuned constants were either the result of random chance or the design of a purposeful mind.

P3) It is far too improbable to ascribe these constants to random chance.

C) The fine-tuning of physical constants of this universe were the result of the design of a purposeful mind.

Moreover, there are entirely different teleological arguments like that of Aquinas’s fifth way that focus more on the fact of purpose, of being directed to an end, or of final causality (i.e., teleology proper), which happens even for things which have no intelligence in our world, and which implies an intelligent being who directs natural things to their end. Believe it or not, Aquinas is not exactly formulating an argument that can only work on the assumption of a worldview of Western modernity. Such arguments can, in fact, be fine starting points for raising questions of teleology to which the Bible directs us in its presentations of eschatology or other aspects of teleology within creation. (For example, one might consider the widespread theme of linking God as Creator with God as Lord, Judge, and Savior, which I have explored here.)

Finally, he addresses “the argument from moral intuition” (220). Here, he relies on Immanuel Kant’s particular rendition of what has been called a moral argument for the existence of God. He all too briefly summarizes it in terms reminiscent of Paley’s watchmaker analogy as, “our moral sense implies a Supreme Moralist, an ultimate Lawgiver” (220). Now, Wright prefers to rework this in a fashion that focuses on our being made in the image of God as a vocation (rather than as a particular aspect of what we are; 221), but unfortunately his summary is difficult to put in a format like we have done previously, not least because he incorporates each of the aforementioned seven signposts.

But he also provides a response to it in an attempt to illustrate its inadequacy:

Deeper than the cynic’s sneer is our own analysis: that we have failed, individually and corporately. We have turned justice into oppression, beauty into kitsch, freedom into licence, truth into fake news, power into bullying. We have turned spirituality into self-exploration or self-gratification. We have made the calling to relationships the excuse for exploitation. All these, from a Christian point of view, have the word ‘idolatry’ hanging over them.

It gets worse. Even when we haven’t got it wrong, when we really have done justice, loved beauty, given and sustained freedom, told the truth, exercised power with wise restraint, and sought the true God with all our hearts and loved our neighbor as ourselves—why, then entropy kicks in. This is John Stuart Mill’s response to Kant. However much you puff up the human moral capacity—and, in my version, however much you emphasize vocational qualities common to all humans—events in the world, from Lisbon to Auschwitz, events in our hearts and lives, and the harsh fact that we all die and life seems a cruel joke, suggest that any new version of the ‘moral’ argument will fail the test of ‘theodicy’. The moral argument, even in my new form, falls through the ice and drowns. (235–36)

Wright does go on to argue that his signposts, even in their brokenness, are suggestive of what they point to, and he illustrates how this is so. And I understand that Wright is not addressing all the different varieties of moral argument that have been formulated, but it is a real shame that he does not. Otherwise, maybe he might have seen how this is not an effective response to a moral argument. The problem of “natural evil” as exemplified in his noting the Lisbon earthquake says nothing about the matter of morality. Nor does the problem of evil proper, which tends to focus on moral evil, actually undermine the force of such arguments either.

A popular version of this kind of moral argument, as summarized by William Lane Craig in many places, is as follows:

P1) If God does not exist, moral facts do not exist.

P2) Moral facts exist.

C) Therefore, God exists.

“Moral facts” could also be replaced by “objective moral values and duties” (i.e., moral values and duties that are objectively true and obligatory and not merely subjectively preferred). Glenn Andrew Peoples has elaborated this as follows:

P1) If there are moral facts, then their basis is either natural or supernatural.

P2) The basis of moral facts is not natural.

P3) Therefore, if there are moral facts, then their basis is supernatural.

P4) The most plausible way to think of a supernatural basis of moral facts is in terms of a supernatural person who brings moral facts about.

C) Therefore, if there are moral facts, the most plausible way to think of their basis is in terms of a supernatural person.

It is also possible to formulate an abductive moral argument, wherein God best explains moral knowledge, moral value, and moral responsibility. I have seen still other versions, such as the argument from the other direction that moral obligations are inexplicably strange on the assumption of a non-theistic universe.

As long as there are objective moral values, objective moral obligations, or moral facts, this kind of argument can work. The problem of evil does not undermine it. If anything, it sharpens its force, particularly since the problem of evil derives any logical force it has from our sense of moral facts (even if imperfectly understood). The argument does not rest on any estimation of how moral humans can be; it rests on moral facts existing at all. And if we can acknowledge this or at least act like we believe there are moral facts, in spite of all of our inclinations to evil and our being surrounded by evil, that is just all the more suggestive of a transcendent source of what is moral. As such, Wright has not shown this particular signpost to be broken in the same fashion as his others. He has simply not dealt with it well.

If you want an interesting overview of these and other arguments that Wright would have done better to incorporate or at least address, see Trent Horn’s presentation here.

1. As Wright says in his preface, there are many senses in which one can speak of “natural theology”: “Two recent surveys show something of the range of current possibilities. Christopher Brewer lists five options: (1) natural religion; (2) a proof or argument for God’s existence; (3) signs of God’s existence within creation; (4) ‘Christian natural theology’, that is, starting from already Christian premises and using arguments from the natural world to expand upon or confirm the knowledge of God already given in Jesus Christ; (5) a theology of nature…. Alister McGrath, for his part, offers six options: (1) ‘the branch of philosophy which investigates what human reason unaided by revelation can tell us concerning God’; (2) ‘a demonstration or affirmation of the existence of God on the basis of the regularity and complexity of the natural world’; (3) ‘the intellectual outcome of the natural tendency of the human mind to desire or be inclined toward God’; (4) ‘the exploration of an analogy or intellectual resonance between the human experience of nature on the one hand, and of the Christian gospel on the other’; (5) ‘an attempt to demonstrate that ‘naturalist’ accounts of the world and the achievements of the natural sciences are intrinsically deficient, and that a theological approach is required to give a comprehensive and coherent interpretation of the natural order’; (6) ‘a “theology of nature”—that is, a specifically Christian understanding of the natural world, reflecting the core assumptions of the Christian faith, which is to be contrasted with secular or naturalist accounts of nature’.” (x)