An argument for the non-existence of God based on Wittgenstein's theory about Ethics (+ criticism)

The argument I'm going to put here and then criticise is not mine. I'll just call the author of this argument “Mr.S” for convenience.

His argument goes as follows:
[quote= Mr.S] Let us admit (something Wittgenstein would not admit) that there is indeed an "ethical value in itself", as Objectivists say. But if that ethical value exists, that value could not be strictly in this physical or material world, because if it were in the purely physical or material world it could not give transcendental meaning to the physical or material world, because it is precisely an empirical phenomenon. That is, the sense of the world has to be outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen ("Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist"), in such a way that the meaning of the world has to be outside it, and if it is outside the world it implies that it is transcendental : “All value is transcendental. It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed ”. "Ethics is transcendental" says Wittgenstein.

"God does not reveal himself" (Wittgenstein)

Why doesn't he reveal himself? Because he can't reveal himself. How could the transcendent be revealed in the immanent physical world?
Nothing that is physical and material can produce something that is not physical and material, such as an immutable value (an absolute duty).

It is like expecting an apple tree to produce pears or to get wine out of a large barrel of water. A logical impossibility.

A two-way problem arises in this relationship of God with the empirical world:

(1) Upwards: the possibility of language to grasp the transcendental.

(2) Downwards: the possibility of the transcendental to infiltrate, to penetrate the world.

A problem, I repeat, that has two courses of action, being double in nature: first, the possibility that a physical language, that a factual thought, that a thought that is matter captures the transcendental; second, that from a thought or better still from a transcendental idea there is room for the possibility of penetrating the physical world, and then, look what Wittgenstein concludes: “A single proposition of ethics, that is, a single absolute proposition that were really an ethical proposition [or to put it another way, a single speck of God, of the transcendental] that penetrated the empirical world would make it burst into a thousand pieces ”. What a horrible thing, this is!

That is to say: If God existed (which in itself remains to be seen), there would also be an unfathomable gulf between his greatness, his omnipotence, his spirituality and his ability to access the material world. It is assumed here, of course, that God is not matter (he is immaterial), since if he were subject to physical laws he would be a decadent God, an absolutely powerless God, a hoax of a God. In other words, despite his omnipotence, he cannot infiltrate matter, into the physical world in which we live, so he remains an alien God, from another plane. This leads me to a devastating conclusion on the theological-metaphysical plane:

If God existed, the physical world would not exist. The physical world is ontologically incompatible with the nature of God. A single particle of the transcendental (of ethics, for example) would serve to crumble the entire universe. But, the physical world exists. Ergo: God does not exist.[/quote]

Criticism:

1. The main problem, in my opinion, is the premiss: “If God exists, the physical world would not exist”. To see why this premiss is problematic, we can see how creation would have occured according to the argument: In order for God to create the world, God had to mix the metaphysical (himself) with the physical.

But that seems plainly false, it assumes that:

a) The world (the physical) already exists before it is created, which is clearly absurd.

b) That there was a place where the world was not, that God interacted with that physical place by permeating it with his divine/ metaphysical essence (so to speak) in order to give rise to a world where divine revelation occured. Those who oppose this view can argue against this through the philosophy of Saint Augustine: There was no place where the world was not, before the creation: since God created the world out of nothing, space, like time, was created when the world was created.

Another possible interpretation of this premiss is: first God created the world, then some time after the creation he impregnated the physical with his divine essence (this could be seen as the first time God spoke directly to human beings).

The problem with that interpretation is that according to most accepted theological conceptions of God, God is outside time, and therefore he couldn't have first created the world, and then permeated it with his metaphysical essence, rather he must have done that all at once in his eternal present.

It must be granted, however, that it is very difficult, if not impossible, for one to represent oneself, If God exists, how he created the world so as to make revelation possible (if indeed he could).

At first, one naturally imagines that God would have separated a part of himself, then have this “speck” of himself interact with “nothingness” to give birth to the universe. But this is dubious since we are told by theologians that God is perfectly simple and therefore has no parts, and even if he did, he couldn't have separated one of his divine parts without changing, which contradicts his being immutable.

Also because it's not even clear that this notion of absolute “nothingness” even has a meaning, since it's unimaginable.

Rudolf Carnap gave good arguments in favor of the claim that the concept of “nothingness” is merely the product of bad syntax, and therefore meaningless (this of course is also an argument against the idea that God created the world out of “nothing”).

2. Another problem has to to with the way Mr. S interprets Wittgenstein (what Mr.S says “Wittgenstein concludes” is really what he concludes), the passage he refers to seems to be this one, from his Lecture on Ethics:

I can only describe my feeling by the metaphor, that, if a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world. Our words used as we use them in science, are vessels capable only of containing and conveying meaning and sense, natural meaning and sense. Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our words will only express facts; as a teacup will only hold a teacup full of water even if I were to pour out a gallon over it.

It is important to highlight that Wittgenstein clearly states that what he said is merely a metaphor of a feeling, meaning he is not asserting that this would literally happen.

Mr.S' assertion also strikes me as quite arbitrary, for how could the metaphysical destroy the physical world without interacting, and therefore blending, with it?

3. Mr.S seems to be mistaken with regards logical impossibility, since there is no logical impossibility about a state of affairs in which an apple tree produce another fruit. David Hume, with his formulation of the problem of induction, made this clear. So his analogy is a bad one.

Unless, of course, we define an apple tree as one that can only produce apples.

In that case, his point would be that, by definition, something metaphysical cannot happen in the physical world, but only in the metaphysical realm (since if it happened in the physical, it would be physical). On this ground, he rejects revelation and miracles.

But those who do believe in revelation and miracles would reply that his argument is question begging, since they feel no logical compulsion to accept the definition of physical which implies that what they call miracles and revelation are physical by definition (since otherwise they would not occur in the physical world).

Though I suppose his retort would be to say that without this definition, the very distinction between the physical and the non-physical/metaphysical becomes blurred.

As for the question whether God, if he exists, created the world and revealed himself in it: If he did do both those things, it seems one must admit that one cannot comprehend how he did them, and if he couldn't (again, assuming for sake of argument that he exists, and is transcendent) then that would effectively refute all the claims of all the religions in the world which claimed to have a supernatural basis.

My personal criterion is that we should suspend judgement about this matter.