The Problem With God: Why Atheists, True Believers, and Even Agnostics Must All be
Wrong, Peter Steinberger, Columbia University Press, July 2, 2013, ISBN-13: 978-0231163545
Peter Steinberger is a noted philosopher who in this book tackles the problem of God's existence.
As a philosopher, he holds himself to extremely high standards: his arguments are constructed to
be as convincing as possible, if not irrefutable. He is, moreover, an accessible writer who
expresses his ideas in a basic, if somewhat chatty, style. The book is easily read by anyone with
an interest in religion, God, atheism, and related subjects.
Steinberger's fundamental argument is that the question of God's existence is such a
contradiction in terms that it makes no sense for us to bother asking it. We live in a world of
cause and effect, in which our lives and the material world around us are shaped by events which
cause other events to happen, in an infinite chain, or at least as long as the earth exists. Our
thinking is entirely predicated on the reality of cause and effect, which prompts us to posit that
the universe must have had a creator, a First Mover, who put everything in motion. Call this
entity God - Steinberger is happy with that - but the logic of cause and effect demands that
something we will call God created the universe.
The problem arises that cause and effect also demands that we seek the origins of God as well.
He could not have sprung up from nothing; Steinberger shows how this argument (which even
scientists are now making regarding what preceded the Big Bang) falls apart, because our
experience proves that something cannot come from nothing. The conundrum therefore exists
that God cannot satisfy two competing and contradictory conditions - he cannot exist as the
creator of the universe and First Mover, and at the same time satisfy the inexorable demand from
cause and effect that he himself must have a progenitor.
Steinberger investigates all the theological circumlocutions to this conundrum, such as God is the
exception that proves the rule - the one being not subject to cause and effect, or that God is
simply a mystery beyond our comprehension (except that we somehow know he is all-loving,
all-powerful, all-seeing, etc.). He deals with each of these by showing them to be evasions that
don't really satisfy our deep down intuition that cause and effect cannot simply be waived away.
Similarly, Steinberger shows how atheists are not correct either, since they ignore the problem of
the origin of the universe. Nor do agnostics have an answer, because they are asserting that the
question of God's existence has an answer and they will let us know what it is someday when
they discover it. They ignore the conundrum at the core of God's existence.
At the end of many of the chapters, Steinberger asserts that all is not lost, and that there is an
answer to the problem. At the end of the book, he shows how Plato came up with an important
insight to this problem, but I won't spoil it for you by revealing Steinberger's conclusion of hope.
This is an important contribution to the discussion of God's existence, and the book deserves a
wide audience. It is a completely different approach than is found in the popular literature
regarding the atheism-theism debate. Steinberger's arguments are tautly structured and not easy
to bat away or dismiss. Any interested and reasonably intelligent reader can benefit greatly from
this book.