The Anthropological Argument for the Existence of God



The Anthropological Argument for the Existence of God

The anthropological argument tries to demonstrate the existence of a personal God from the personal nature of human beings. The essence of the argument is this: we as human beings are personal beings. This means that we are constituted by a mind which is self-aware and is rational, a heart which is free and can love and which is there fore morally responsible, and a soul which longs for meaning and significance. Consciousness, rationality, love, morality, and meaning: these constitute the essence of what it is to be a person in the full sense of the term.

The dilemma we face is this: either we exist in an environment which is compatible with these attributes, or we do not. Either our environment is congruous with these attributes-it renders them intelligible and answers them-or it does not. To illustrate, we hunger, and behold, there is food. We thirst, and behold, there is water. We have sex drives, and behold, there is sex. Our environment, then, is congruous with our natural hunger, thirst and sex drive. And given the kind of world we live in, we can understand why we hunger, thirst, and have sex drives. Our cosmic environment ‘answers’ our natural dries and thereby makes sense of them.

Does our cosmic environment answer to the basic features of our personhood outlined above? Unless our environment is ultimately itself personal, rational, loving, moral, and purposeful, then our cosmic environment does not at all answer to our personhood. Unless there is a personal God who is the ultimate reality within which we exist, then we humans can only be viewed as absurd, tortured, freaks of nature; for everything that is essential to us is utterly out of place in this universe. This, on the other hand, renders human nature completely unexplainable. How could brute nature itself evolve something so out of sync with itself? And, on the other hand, it means that human existence, if we face up to our real situation, is extremely painful. We are the product of a cruel, sick, cosmic, joke.

We humans instinctively assume that reality should be rational, and that reasoning gets us closer to truth, but in the end nature is irrational. There is no overarching mind to it.

We humans instinctively assume that love is a reality, that it is the only ideal worth living for and dying for. But nature seems to be a indifferent, loveless, brute process of colliding chemicals-and so our ideals are reduced to reacting hormones.

We humans instinctively assume that our moral convictions are true to reality, do we not? There are, of course, people who say that moral convictions are ‘just a matter of taste,’ but cut them off at an intersection and their convictions change. You did a gross injustice!

And humans instinctively hunger for meaning and purpose. You can see it all around in the way people behave. We strive to infuse our lives with some sort of meaning. But if our cosmos is ultimately indifferent and purposeless, all we are, all we do, all we believe in, all we strive for is ‘dust in the wind.’ After we exist, it matters not whether anyone has ever, or will ever again, exist. Everything is ultimately meaningless.

So unless the ultimate source of all existence is at least as personal as we are, my contention is that who we are is at least both unexplainable and extremely hard to swallow.

-Greg Boyd from Letters from a Skeptic

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