For the uninitiated, tier lists have become a fashionable way to rank order items, running from F tier to S tier (“super,” above A tier). Sometimes going up to S plus. I watch a lot of weight lifting YouTube videos, and it seems like every fitness influencer has done one of these for best exercises, but it’s used in virtually any other context where something can be rank ordered.

Here I’m largely borrowing from the Substack writer Bentham’s Bulldog and his own tier list about arguments for the existence of God, but my rank ordering departs from his in some major cases. I’ve created my own template using the tier list creator.

F

Anselm’s Ontological Argument

St. Anselm’s ontological argument contends that God, defined as “that which nothing greater can be conceived,” must necessarily exist because a being that exists in reality is greater than one that exists only in the mind. Here I agree with Richard Dawkins that this argument is essentially trying to use word games to force the universe into a particular mode of existence. I will give it some credit because there is a common drive-by response (you can use it to prove anything) that has rejoinders that people don’t seem to be aware of, but there’s a reason this is the argument that skeptics love to cite.

Argument from Motion

This is Aquinas’ “unmoved mover” arguments that posits that everything in motion must have started with some mover. Obviously I’m biased here because this argument doesn’t apply to Latter-day Saint cosmology, but especially with modern-day scientific knowledge regarding the equivalency between energy and mass, if we assume a universe with mass (which is another question for another argument) it follows that it’s not much of a stretch to posit a universe with energy that is neither created nor destroyed but just gets shuffled around.

Neoplatonic Proof

I wasn’t aware of this one before I read Bentham Bulldog’s take on it (“The neo-platonic proof says that if something is made of parts, there must be something responsible for the parts being combined. By regress, the first thing can’t be made of parts, because it would need something else to bind it together“), but it begs the question of what is a whole and what is a part, so it starts smelling like Anselm’s argument in the sense that it’s using word games to try to force a metaphysical framework on the universe.

Modal Ontological Argument

The modal ontological argument contends that if God’s existence is even possible, then God’s existence is necessary because that’s the kind of being a God is. Maybe I need to think harder about this one and I’m not giving it a fair shake, but it just seems like a non-sequitur.

D

Pascal’s Wager

Pascal’s Wager isn’t an argument for the existence of God technically, but an argument for believing in the existence of God, in this case an important distinction. I’m not going to say it’s worthless, but I don’t give it too much weight simply because my priors of the kind of being God is (i.e. he’s not going to change your eternal distinction because you made a pragmatic decision to try to believe something in order to avoid hell).

Kalam’s Argument

I’ll admit to being somewhat biased against this argument since it’s main contemporary proponent, William Lane Craig, is a bit of an insincere dissembler when it comes to Mormonism, but I’m not going to put it in D- or F-tier because it does have a certain appeal to a very real gut instinct that everything has to have a cause.

But that’s as much as I’ll give it. First, with advances in quantum mechanics we know that not everything has a cause. Matter of fact, one of the more popular explanations among scientists for why there is something rather than nothing is because of a truly random, uncaused variation in some pre-existing field.

Second, echoing Joseph Smith here, I don’t see 1 as being any more common sense axiomatic as the idea of infinite regress, where there is an infinite chain of causes with no beginning. God’s not the first cause in Mormonism. Embrace the infinite regress.

C-

Common Consent

Because virtually every society and people have had a belief in God, the object of that belief probably exists. The response to this is obvious, there’s no a priori reason that nearly all humans couldn’t be incorrect about something factually as long as it helps their survival. Also, there are people who don’t believe. Still, I’m not going to completely dismiss this because I will grant some credit to the CS Lewis argument that we only have hungers for things that exist. We thirst because there is water, so too I will allow for the possibility that we have a nearly universal religion/spirituality/higher power drive towards an actual object that exists.

Argument from Miracles

I suspect the majority of miracles can be attributed to natural causes, and a priori I have a hard time seeing God as occasionally jumping into the natural world in a non-subtle way. That being said, there are occasionally enough miracles that are hard enough to hand-wave away (Witnesses to the plates, the Miracle of the Sun, and more controversially the survival of the Jewish people and the founding and survival of Israel) that it would at least give me pause as a skeptic, even if the epistemological force isn’t strong enough to get me all the way to belief.

C

Argument from Beauty

IMHO the argument from beauty is weak for the same reason the traditional argument from design does–evolution can explain it. However, I’m going to give it some credit since it runs along the same lines as the morality argument. Yes, in principle you can believe that beauty is a useful fiction, but like any other abstract idea I just don’t see a lot of people seeing something beautiful and only seeing it in terms of how their synapses respond to a particular orderly configuration. We sense that beauty reflects a reality beyond an evolved fiction.

Classical Argument from Design

For the purposes of this list the “classical argument” covers the traditional watchmaker analogy about anatomical functions. Saying that God had to create something as intricate as the eye, for example. It’s low because evolution has done a fairly good job of explaining this once we get dividing, multiplying cells. However, I’m not giving it a lower grade because there are still enough unknowns and marvelous watches involved, to continue with the analogy, that I wouldn’t be totally surprised if I showed up in the hereafter and God revealed that he had to push things here and there to get a human being, for example. Also, while, with a few exceptions mentioned elsewhere in this list, irreducible complexity, where a biological function is non-functional until it is completely evolved, is probably resolvable with enough research, without the actual data or simulation resolving the matter faith trust in the evolutionary process as the key to that particular problem also requires some faith in the process.

C+

Nomological Argument

“The nomological argument claims that God is the best explanation of causal regularities. All of the particles in the universe obey the same laws. Hildebrand and Metcalf—two quite good philosophers—give the following analogy: suppose that you’re playing poker and you see a person keeps getting royal flushes. It would be reasonable to conclude they were cheating. This is because:

The regularity is very surprising by chance. It needs an explanation. Why is it that they keep getting the same good hand, out of all the hands they might get.
The regularity is plausibly explained by the actions of an intentional agent.”

I might be misuderstanding this, but I think this touches on the issue Stephen Hawking brought up when he states that we know the equations that govern the universe, but we don’t know what breathes fire into them.

I sense there might be something here along the lines of Wigner’s famous essay “the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” but I’d have to think more deeply about it. I suspect that this is just a derivative of the old “why is there something rather than nothing” argument.

B-

Skepticism

The assumption of naturalism brings with it some highly possible but counterintuitive states like Boltzmann brains or simulations/brains in vats. To some degree the belief that we’re not in such a state and that we are living in a real world is taken on faith, since it would look the same either way, so positing a God also removes these bizarre possibilities. However, this argument is lower on the list because it’s not clear how reductio ad absurdum the Boltzmann brain or brain in the vat possibility is.

Psychophysical Harmony

This has become a popular new argument for God that a lot of people regard very highly. “Roughly, psychophysical harmony consists in the fact that phenomenal states are correlated with physical states and with one another in strikingly fortunate ways. For example, phenomenal states are correlated with behavior and functioning that is justified or rationalized by those very phenomenal states, and phenomenal states are correlated with verbal reports and judgments that are made true by those very phenomenal states.”

I think I kind of get where they’re going, and I probably need to spend more time with this, but I don’t see why evolution wouldn’t explain this. Additionally, there are cases where our evolved intuition does not map onto reality, namely quantum mechanics, which is patently absurd. But again, the proponents of this theory claim to have a response to this that I don’t quite understand.

B

Possibility of Life

Although others have made this point it isn’t considered one of the classic God arguments. While evolution takes care of the argument of design once we already have a dividing, multiplying cell, and while the origin of life discussed below presents its own difficult conundrum, the fact that biochemically the elements have just the right characteristics to create such a cell is a strike in favor of a grand organizer. I feel like organic chemistry is one big lecture on how sophisticated biological machinery can be created from the particular chemical particulars that carbon molecules happen to be blessed with, and both the fact that carbon molecules have these characteristics as well as the fact that they can build complex biological machinery hints at design pre-evolution.

B+

Argument from Religious Experience

This one maybe should have been divided into two: argument from one’s own religious experience and argument from other people’s religious experiences. I trust the former much more than the latter. If you have religious experiences with a divine being that is speaking back and forth with you, and the feelings map onto a religious framework, then at some point you just kind of accept the reality of that person on the other end. To quote from my testimony, “an internal feeling experience is not something that can be felt for others: I can only tell you what I feel. Again, some would argue that on some deep level my brain is creating all of these things; it’s easy to get on the slippery slope of dilettante Freudian analysis that can be applied to anything (“Why do you like chocolate?” “Because of my potty training as a child.”). At some point you just have to accept what you feel.” However, because of the possibility that it is wish fulfillment that is so incredibly deep-seated I can’t detect it (again, however, there is no positive evidence for that, just the possibility, so it shouldn’t be assumed as a default), I’m not placing this in the top, top tier.

The Anthropic Argument

I never heard of this one before I read Bentham’s Bulldog summary, but I kind of like it. At the very least it tickles my Latter-day Saint priors that God has creations and children beyond number and that God’s defining characteristic is infinite creation.

You exist.
You’re likelier to exist if there are more total people that exist. Suppose that a coin gets flipped which creates one person if heads and ten people if tails. You should, after being created by the coinflip, think tails is ten times likelier than heads.
If 10 people existing makes your existence ten times likelier and 100 people existing makes your existence 100 times likelier, infinity people existing makes your existence infinitely likelier.
Thus, you should think there are infinite people. This doesn’t stop at the smallest infinity—you should think the number of people that exist is the most that there could be.
That’s a really huge number. Theism can nicely explain why that number of people exists, but atheism has no comparable explanation. In fact, because it’s good to create, theism actively predicts that number of people existing, while atheism does not.

So this isn’t a “proof,” since you can exist if there are only a billion coin flips, but I don’t see why it doesn’t increase the probability that there are even more sentient creatures out there. It does kind of smell like the Doomsday argument, where you take the existence of a single point to extrapolate a whole unobservable world.

The Moral Argument

If there is no God, then there are no objective moral values and duties.
But there are objective moral values and duties.
So God exists.

This one is probably one of my more controversial calls so I’ll explain. For me a basic axiom that I am working off of is that some things are wrong. I know this as much as I know anything else besides my own existence. We can try to go down the rabbit hole on “well, how do you know there is such a thing as right and wrong,” but for me that’s about as nihilistically skeptical as challenging virtually anything else you might believe, so I’m fine taking this as an axiom that I’m working off of.

I also see it patently absurd that you can get to the ought of wrongness from the is of molecular mechanics in our brain. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s grounded in a personal God, but it’s grounded in some kind of a moral realm outside of math and physics, so for the purposes of this list I’m considering that “God” and placing it in the B+ tier. And yes I know that a lot of people much smarter than me believe otherwise, but frankly the idea that morality can be justifiably grounded in brain synapses is so patently absurd my only explanation for their disagreement is that morality is so vital to our reality that they have a lot of motivated reasoning going on.

Also, as an aside, people who argue that morality is only justified by evolution or molecular mechanics, or that there is no real morality a la moral error theory or moral skepticism, almost inevitably live their life as if their claims are not true, so until I see somebody who, to be ironic, has the strength of their nihilistic convictions, I don’t take their arguments that seriously. This is true not only for morality but virtually any conceptual belief. You’re happy to see somebody because you recognize their human-ness/personhood, you don’t just simply see them as a lump of molecules like a chair is a lump of molecules. If the only truth is mathematical and scientific truth then that has much more expansive implications than justifying the proverbial Dosteovskian atheist psychopath.

A

Consciousness

This argument is similar to my moral argument above, I fundamentally don’t believe that you can go from molecules hitting each other to consciousness, I’m a David Chalmers dualist. Against, this doesn’t necessarily = personal God, but it = something more metaphysical and abstract than raw molecular mechanics, which is close enough to “God” that I’m putting it in this list.

A+

Origin of Life

I talk more about the details here, but I put this in a different category than traditional design. While evolution handles the traditional design arguments reasonably well, there is still the looming problem of the watch inconveniently spontaneously arising at the very beginning, before we have evolutionary dynamics at play. I’m putting this at A+ and not S-tier because I’m open to the possibility that, this not being my field, there is some angle I haven’t grasped yet, but whenever I have taken the time to do a deep dive and think hard about this I’ve always come to the conclusion that 1) given the extremes of combinatorial probabilities involved there’s no way a functioning cell simply arose from a mash of chemicals, 2) we are nowhere close, misleading headlines notwithstanding, to coming up with a plausible stepwise, evolutionary process for building up to the first protocell that takes into account information transmission, protection, energy absorption and use, etc. However, I’m open to some kind of a multiverse/big universe argument where if you have an unimaginably large space eventually a watch will spontaneously arise, but again we’re entering into very speculative territory.

S

Quantum Mechanics

This is probably my most controversial call (I talk more about it here), but once you get to the point where you have scientifically demonstrated that the universe knows when you are looking at it, then in my opinion we’ve fairly well established that there is an underlying awareness built into the cosmic fabric. Some physicists love to try to hand wave this away, but there’s a reason Einstein said that quantum mechanics was spooky, and it’s just gotten spookier (e.g. Bell’s Inequality) since then.

Fine Tuning

This is the big one that forces atheists into a corner, and even famously secular physicists such as Steven Weinberg admit that this is a difficult problem. Basically, over the course of the 20th century we gradually came to realize that the universe’s parameters are highly, highly tuned to life (see Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on FT here), and that if, say, the power of gravity or the nuclear force to weak force ratio were different, the universe would be a lifeless void. How tuned? There are about a dozen different parameters, but to take one of the more powerful cases: if the cosmological constant, or the rate at which the universe is expanding, was changed by 1 part in 10^120 then life in the universe would not exist. This is the rough equivalent of throwing a dart across the universe and hitting a specific atom. And that’s only one parameter. So at this point the only two options are God or a multiverse setup where we have a multiverse that has different universes with different parameters and that while the vast majority are lifeless, an infinitesimally small number can harbor life. So yes, there’s technically an out that doesn’t require God, but it involves positing something that, like God, has no direct scientific empirical support to back it up.

My Ranked Tier List of Arguments for the Existence of God

F