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Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: pauljernberg.com
Spanish translations by Vélez Translations, www.veleztranslations.com
A few weeks ago, I made a video that I titled “Undeniable Proof of God’s Existence.” The point of the video was to illustrate how inconsistent and illogical it is for people to expect undeniable proof before they will honestly explore the possibility of God’s existence.
And, unfortunately, a large portion of viewers of that video felt cheated by the title, apparently, anticipating that I had promised to offer undeniable proof rather than talk about this unreasonable standard - which essentially proves the point of the video.
The thesis of the video was left unanswered by these critics, some of whom made video responses of their own. So, I thought I’d do a follow up to that video here in which I will illustrate that thesis in, what I hope will be a more convincing way, as well as offer an actual proof in the process.
[intro]
Before I present the proof in question, I want to provide a little context as well as an explanation for how I’m going to present it and why.
The first thing I’ll say is that it isn’t well known. I only learned about it relatively recently in spite of the fact that I’ve been reading about various arguments and proofs for God’s existence for as long as I’ve been a theist and Christian - which is over 15 years now.
And whenever I’ve mentioned it to other, well-read, and well-educated theists, I’ve yet to find someone who is familiar with it.
And that’s revealing. There aren’t many commentaries you can read about this proof and there are even fewer people who understand it well enough to discuss it in any meaningful way.
The fact that it is less conspicuous than more popular proofs like the Kalam Cosmological argument or St. Thomas Aquinas’ 5 ways isn’t because of some deficiency in the argument, but rather because I don’t think many people are up to the task of wrestling with it.
The point here being that it is so sophisticated, that there are only a select few who can make heads or tails of it. What that means is, it may very well represent the limits of what human thought can produce on the question of God’s existence.
There are critiques of the proof, but even they appear to lack the kind of confidence you usually find in an explicit refutation. They appear to be more questioning its implications and axioms than anything else.
And yes, it does rely on axioms which seems to be the source of any of the complaints I’ve read about it, but if your only complaint is that the axioms can’t be proven, then you run the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater in order to avoid accepting the God’s existence.
Because the fundamental laws of logic are axioms which cannot be proven, not the least of which is the assumption that the universe is intelligible such that our reason can be meaningfully applied to.
For example, in many of the responses to my previous video, people said that anything that exists should be empirically demonstrable and since nobody has managed to this in the case of God, or so it’s claimed, then there is no proof of God’s existence.
But the claim that the only kind of valid knowledge is empirical knowledge, is not itself, proven empirically which either makes it an axiom adopted on faith, which atheists like Bertrand Russel admitted, or it’s self refuting.
The other thing I should mention, because this may seem curious, but I have a good reason which reinforces the point of this video, is that I’m not going to tell you who came up with this proof except to say that this person is acknowledged by anyone familiar with them, to be one of the greatest minds ever - full stop.