![\"\"](\"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/my-image-800x388.png\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
For the uninitiated, tier lists have become a fashionable way to rank order items, running from F tier to S tier (\u201csuper,\u201d 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\u2019s used in virtually any other context where something can be rank ordered.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Here I\u2019m largely borrowing from the Substack writer Bentham\u2019s Bulldog and<\/span> his own tier list <\/span><\/a>about arguments for the existence of God, but my rank ordering departs from his in some major cases. I\u2019ve created my own template using the <\/span>tier list creator.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n 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\u2019t seem to be aware of, but there\u2019s a reason this is the argument that skeptics love to cite.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This is Aquinas\u2019 \u201cunmoved mover\u201d arguments that posits that everything in motion must have started with some mover. Obviously I\u2019m biased here because this argument doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s not much of a stretch to posit a universe with energy that is neither created nor destroyed but just gets shuffled around.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I wasn\u2019t aware of this one before I read Bentham Bulldog\u2019s take on it (\u201c<\/span>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\u2019t be made of parts, because it would need something else to bind it together\u201c)<\/span>, but it begs the question of what is a whole and what is a part, so it starts smelling like Anselm\u2019s argument in the sense that it\u2019s using word games to try to force a metaphysical framework on the universe.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The modal ontological argument contends that if God’s existence is even possible, then God’s existence is necessary because that\u2019s the kind of being a God is. Maybe I need to think harder about this one and I\u2019m not giving it a fair shake, but it just seems like a non-sequitur.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Pascal\u2019s Wager isn\u2019t 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\u2019m not going to say it\u2019s worthless, but I don\u2019t give it too much weight simply because my priors of the kind of being God is (i.e. he\u2019s not going to change your eternal distinction because you made a pragmatic decision to try to believe something in order to avoid hell).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019ll admit to being somewhat biased against this argument since it\u2019s main contemporary proponent, William Lane Craig, is a bit of an insincere dissembler when it comes to Mormonism, but I\u2019m 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But that\u2019s as much as I\u2019ll 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Second, echoing Joseph Smith here, I don\u2019t 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\u2019s not the first cause in Mormonism. Embrace the infinite regress.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019s no a priori reason that nearly all humans couldn\u2019t be incorrect about something factually as long as it helps their survival. Also, there are people who don\u2019t believe. Still, I\u2019m 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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I suspect the majority of miracles can be attributed to natural causes, and a priori <\/span>I have a hard time seeing God as occasionally jumping into the natural world in a non-subtle way<\/span><\/a>. That being said, there are occasionally enough miracles that are hard enough to hand-wave away (Witnesses to the plates, <\/span>the Miracle of the Sun<\/span><\/a>, 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\u2019t strong enough to get me all the way to belief.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n IMHO the argument from beauty is weak for the same reason the traditional argument from design does\u2013evolution can explain it. However, I\u2019m 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\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n For the purposes of this list the \u201cclassical argument\u201d covers the traditional watchmaker analogy about anatomical functions. Saying that God had to create something as intricate as the eye, for example. It\u2019s low because evolution has done a fairly good job of explaining this once we get dividing, multiplying cells. However, I\u2019m not giving it a lower grade because there are still enough unknowns and marvelous watches involved, to continue with the analogy, that I wouldn\u2019t 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<\/em> also requires some faith in the process.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe 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\u2014two quite good philosophers\u2014give the following analogy: suppose that you\u2019re playing poker and you see a person keeps getting royal flushes. It would be reasonable to conclude they were cheating. This is because:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019t know what breathes fire into them.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I sense there might be something here along the lines of Wigner\u2019s <\/span>famous essay<\/span><\/a> \u201cthe Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,\u201d but I\u2019d have to think more deeply about it. I suspect that this is just a derivative of the old \u201cwhy is there something rather than nothing\u201d argument.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019re 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\u2019s not clear how reductio ad absurdum the Boltzmann brain or brain in the vat possibility is.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This has become a <\/span>popular new argument <\/span><\/a>for God that a lot of people regard very highly. \u201c<\/span>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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n I think I kind of get where they\u2019re going, and I probably need to spend more time with this, but I don\u2019t see why evolution wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019t quite understand.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Although others have made this point it isn\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This one maybe should have been divided into two: argument from one\u2019s own religious experience and argument from other people\u2019s 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, \u201c<\/span>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\u2019s easy to get on the slippery slope of dilettante Freudian analysis that can be applied to anything (\u201cWhy do you like chocolate?\u201d \u201cBecause of my potty training as a child.\u201d). At some point you just have to accept what you feel.\u201d However, because of the possibility that it is wish fulfillment that is so incredibly deep-seated I can\u2019t detect it (again, however, there is no positive evidence for that, just the possibility, so it shouldn\u2019t be assumed as a default), I\u2019m not placing this in the top, top tier.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I never heard of this one before I read Bentham\u2019s 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\u2019s defining characteristic is infinite creation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n So this isn\u2019t a \u201cproof,\u201d since you can exist if there are only a billion coin flips, but I don\u2019t see why it doesn\u2019t increase the probability that there are even more sentient creatures out there. It does kind of smell like <\/span>the Doomsday argument<\/span><\/a>, where you take the existence of a single point to extrapolate a whole unobservable world.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This one is probably one of my more controversial calls so I\u2019ll 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 \u201cwell, how do you know there is such a thing as right and wrong,\u201d but for me that\u2019s about as nihilistically skeptical as challenging virtually anything else you might believe, so I\u2019m fine taking this as an axiom that I\u2019m working off of.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019t necessarily mean that it\u2019s grounded in a personal God, but it\u2019s grounded in some kind of a moral realm outside of math and physics, so for the purposes of this list I\u2019m considering that \u201cGod\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019t take their arguments that seriously. This is true not only for morality but virtually any conceptual belief. You\u2019re happy to see somebody because you recognize their human-ness\/personhood, you don\u2019t 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This argument is similar to my moral argument above, I fundamentally don\u2019t believe that you can go from molecules hitting each other to consciousness, I\u2019m a David Chalmers dualist. Against, this doesn\u2019t necessarily = personal God, but it = something more metaphysical and abstract than raw molecular mechanics, which is close enough to \u201cGod\u201d that I\u2019m putting it in this list.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I talk more about the details <\/span>here<\/span><\/a>, 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\u2019m putting this at A+ and not S-tier because I\u2019m open to the possibility that, this not being my field, there is some angle I haven\u2019t grasped yet, but whenever I have taken the time to do a deep dive and think hard about this I\u2019ve always come to the conclusion that 1) given the extremes of combinatorial probabilities involved there\u2019s 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\u2019m 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\u2019re entering into very speculative territory.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This is probably my most controversial call (I talk more about it <\/span>here<\/span><\/a>), 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\u2019ve 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\u2019s a reason Einstein said that quantum mechanics was spooky, and it’s just gotten spookier (e.g. Bell’s Inequality) since then.<\/span><\/p>\nF<\/b><\/h1>\n
Anselm\u2019s Ontological Argument<\/span><\/i><\/h3>\n
Argument from Motion\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/h3>\n
Neoplatonic Proof<\/span><\/i><\/h3>\n
Modal Ontological Argument<\/span><\/i><\/h3>\n
D<\/b><\/h1>\n
Pascal\u2019s Wager<\/span><\/i><\/h3>\n
Kalam\u2019s Argument\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/h3>\n
\n
C-<\/b><\/h1>\n
Common Consent<\/span><\/i><\/h3>\n
Argument from Miracles<\/span><\/i><\/h3>\n
C<\/b><\/h1>\n
Argument from Beauty<\/span><\/i><\/h3>\n
Classical Argument from Design<\/span><\/i><\/h3>\n
C+<\/b><\/h1>\n
Nomological Argument<\/span><\/i><\/h3>\n
\n
B-<\/b><\/h1>\n
Skepticism<\/span><\/i><\/h3>\n
Psychophysical Harmony<\/span><\/i><\/h3>\n
B<\/b><\/h1>\n
Possibility of Life<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n
B+<\/b><\/h1>\n
Argument from Religious Experience<\/span><\/i><\/h3>\n
The Anthropic Argument<\/span><\/i><\/h3>\n
\n
The Moral Argument<\/span><\/i><\/h3>\n
\n
A<\/b><\/h1>\n
Consciousness<\/span><\/i><\/h3>\n
A+<\/b><\/h1>\n
Origin of Life<\/span><\/i><\/h3>\n
S<\/b><\/h1>\n
Quantum Mechanics<\/span><\/i><\/h3>\n
Fine Tuning<\/span><\/i><\/h3>\n