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The proofs of God's existence, long pursued in impenetrable books and journals, are engaging wider audiences. Last week Mortimer Adler, popular philosopher and guru of the Great Books Program, published How to Think About God:
A Guide for the 20th Century Pagan (Macmillan; $9.95). In September Doubleday will issue the English version of dissident Roman Catholic Theologian Hans Küng's latest, which despite its 850 pages is a huge bestseller in West Germany. The title: Does God Exist?
His predictable answer: yes. Even nonbelievers, Küng writes, know that an unjust world raises the question of morality and, in turn, religion.
Besides that, the 20th century is littered with the sorry results of supplanting God with an absolute force that is not divine, such as the "people" in Nazism or the party in Communism. Küng's lucid analysis contends that atheism's 19th century patriarchs proclaimed their theories but never bothered to prove them. Ludwig Feuerbach, the founder of modern atheism, asserted that religious beliefs were mere projections of mankind's noblest qualities; Küng responds that such philosophers' belief in the goodness of human nature is far more likely to be such a projection.
Whatever atheism's weaknesses, what about the other side? Can God's existence be established by reason, without resorting to the Bible, revelations, church dogmas or a leap of faith?
The attempt is traditionally known as "natural theology," and except for the largely self-contained world of Roman Catholic philosophy, it went out of style more than a century ago.
In the current revival, most arguments still employ the traditional definition of God as a unique personal creative entity.
What is new is the effort to refurbish and enhance the traditional approaches to the problem. A summary of the work being done to put new wine in these old wineskins:
The Moral Proof. This is essentially Küng's approach. Conscience doth make Christians — or at least theists — of us all.
The case builds upon the universal signs among mankind of conscience, of some moral law and of each person's inability to keep it satisfactorily, all of which can not be explained as mere conditioning or self-interest. The source of that spark of conscience, theists contend, is God. The most celebrated exponent, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), wrote that each person's quest for the "highest good" implies the existence of a moral being as the necessary condition for this idea, who is himself the source of all morality.
Updating Kant, Dartmouth Scholar Ronald Green argues in Religious Reason (Oxford; $12) that though skeptics may think primitive instincts or emotions are the basis for religion, faith actually stems from the sophisticated reasoning process that distinguishes humans from animals. To Green, man must seek an independent, coherent source for his morality. Although Kant ended with a personal God, Green will only go so far as to postulate "some kind of supreme moral causal agency," whether a personal deity or Hinduism's impersonal karma.