Hatcher's Proof

There are certain existential questions that have never interested me. One of these is the proof of God’s existence. I have maintained for some time that you cannot prove nor disprove His existence through rational argument; rather it is a matter of either faith, or even better, a Reality once you have come face to face with either through experience, insight, or revelation that has removed all doubt forever. The challenge with this lack of doubt is to communicate it to unbelievers and convince them you are rational or sane. Yes, they might envy you your certitude or have their atheistic armour pierced by observation of your fine human qualities by virtue of your “irrational” views, but to convince them of the veracity of your view is an uphill battle.

There are traditional proofs of God, but they are existential and not scientific in the modern sense, and inadequate as arguments to a skeptical heart and mind. The Bahá’í Scriptures maintain that this has always been and will always be the way of the Almighty, for He places a high value on His creatures who will seek and find Him, which would simply be too easy if He were apparent for all to see without any hard-won spiritual insight.

Undaunted by attitudes such as mine, the late William Hatcher published several books on the subject, collating the best knowledge we have from the fields of mathematics, philosophy, physics, metaphysics, epistemology, and even linguistics to formulate his scientific proof of the existence of God, a proof which he calls Minimalism. Building on the classical Greek philosophers through Avicenna, Descartes, Gödel, and more modern thinkers, his approach seeks to debunk the excesses of reductionism and subjectivism, the fallacies of materialism and post-modernism, uproot the attitudes of atheism, agnosticism, cynicism, and skepticism, and tries to establish the invigorating breezes of rational thought over illogical dogmatism. [This has to be the worse sentence I’ve written since fourth grade.]

After a careful building up of parameters and methodology, in his last work: Minimalism: A Bridge Between Classical Philosophy and the Bahá’í Revelation, Hatcher has arrived at four metaphysical principles (as I understand them): first that Reality, the totality of existence, is composite; secondly, that every phenomenon is either caused by something else, or self-caused, but never both; thirdly, the cause of a phenomenon will also be the cause of its parts; and fourthly that a part of a phenomenon cannot be a part of its cause. From these principles he proposes a theorem that there can be only one universal cause and goes about proving it by arguments derived from the four principles.

Confused? If so, it’s not Hatcher’s fault, by mine, for he sets out these arguments with exemplary lucidity and relish. It should provide a colossal challenge for those who are predisposed to dismiss any introduction of a spiritual dimension into scientific inquiry as hokum, as it did in college milieu wherever he presented it. Check it out.