Peirce and the Proofs for the Existence of God

Abstract

The article analyzes Charles Peirce’s views on traditional arguments for the existence of God: teleological, cosmological, and ontological ones. It shows that Peirce was a religious thinker who, even when he was young, tried to solve the problem of whether it was possible to reason about God. However, he never accepted any standard theistic proof. The teleological argument according to Pierce fails for two reasons: first, evidence given by the order in nature is compatible with both theism and atheism, and secondly, the process of weighing this evidence itself undermines reverence for God. The cosmological argument fails because, at the origin of Peirce's cosmology, there is nothing, not something. This thesis is determined by his theory of objective randomness. So, the cosmologicalargument doesn’t work. The ontological argument fails for two reasons as well: firstly, Peirce agrees with Kant’s view that being is not a real predicate. Secondly, Peirce himself defines existence as a reaction, which excludes the application of this predicate to God. However, at the end of the article, I analyze one text in which Peirce nonetheless admits the persuasiveness of one non-standard version of the ontological argument and solves the problem of evil.