Why the Case for God Is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts

“A convergence of arguments, each pointing in the same direction, may have more power collectively than any one of them alone.”

— C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

---

Many Roads, One Destination

There is a unique type of argument that does not rest on a single pillar but is instead built like a cathedral—supported by many columns, rising from diverse foundations, each distinct, yet each contributing to the same grand structure. This is the Argument from the Convergence of Arguments, sometimes known simply as the Argument from Many Arguments. It is not a single syllogism, but a cumulative case: a powerful ensemble of independent rational pathways, all converging on the conclusion that God exists.

Skeptics often want one knockout blow—one argument that leaves no doubt. But this expectation misunderstands how most important truths are known. In a courtroom, juries don’t wait for one piece of irrefutable evidence; they look at a body of testimony, forensic analysis, motive, means, and behavioral evidence. Each strand may be imperfect, but together they form a net strong enough to hold a verdict.

Similarly, the rational case for God is not one argument—but many, drawn from metaphysics, moral philosophy, science, aesthetics, logic, history, and personal experience. Each has been debated and refined for centuries. And while none are invulnerable to critique, together they make a cumulative case that is deeply compelling and rationally unavoidable.

---

The Logic of Converging Evidence

P1: If multiple, independent lines of reasoning from diverse domains converge upon a single explanation, that explanation gains rational credibility by the force of convergence.
P2: The existence of God is the conclusion of numerous independent arguments, including but not limited to the cosmological, teleological, moral, ontological, experiential, historical, aesthetic, and consciousness-based arguments.
P3: These arguments emerge from distinct fields (philosophy, science, ethics, human consciousness, etc.), employ different premises and methods, and are not all susceptible to the same objections or presuppositions.
P4: The convergence of these arguments upon God as a necessary, personal, transcendent, intelligent being is not matched by any other worldview or alternative hypothesis with equal explanatory scope or coherence.
C: Therefore, belief in God is more rationally justified than disbelief, due to the cumulative weight of converging arguments.

This is not an argument that says “we don’t know, therefore God.” Rather, it says: “we have multiple reasons from multiple sources, all pointing toward God.”

---

The Many Arrows Pointing to God

1. The Cosmological Argument

Everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause. William Lane Craig has revitalized this as the Kalam Cosmological Argument, noting, “The universe cannot be past eternal because actual infinities cannot exist in reality and because temporal regress leads to absurdities.”¹

2. The Fine-Tuning of the Universe

Change the gravitational constant, strong nuclear force, or rate of cosmic expansion even slightly, and life becomes impossible. Physicist Paul Davies writes: “There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all… It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature’s numbers to make the Universe.”²

3. The Moral Argument

Objective moral values exist. Such values require a transcendent grounding.
C.S. Lewis argued: “If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.”³

4. The Argument from Consciousness

Materialism fails to explain subjective experience. Consciousness resists reduction to physical processes. J.P. Moreland states: “It is difficult to see how purely physical processes could generate consciousness and intentionality.”⁴

5. The Argument from Beauty

Why does beauty—unnecessary for survival—exist at all? Why does it stir longing? Hans Urs von Balthasar said, “Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach.”⁵

6. The Ontological Argument

If God is the greatest conceivable being, and existence in reality is greater than in thought alone, then God must exist. Alvin Plantinga’s modal version uses possible world semantics to bolster this claim.⁶

7. The Argument from Desire

We have desires no earthly thing can satisfy. As Lewis wrote, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”⁷

8. The Historical Argument for the Resurrection

Multiple early sources, enemy attestation, and the explosive rise of Christianity all point to the resurrection of Jesus. N.T. Wright argues: “The only explanation that makes sense of the empty tomb and the sightings of Jesus is that he really rose from the dead.”⁸

---

The Power of Convergence: Probability and the Burden of Atheism

Theism vs. Atheism on 20 Arguments (these 20 arguments are taken from philosophers Dr. Peter Kreeft and Dr. Ronald K. Tacelli in their book, Handbook of Christian Apologetics, InterVarsity Press, 1994)

Argument	Theism Explains	Atheism Must Explain Away
1. Cosmological	A necessary First Cause outside time and space	How something came from nothing without cause
2. Teleological (Design)	Fine-tuning due to a Designer	Chance or multiverse without evidence
3. Moral	Objective moral values grounded in God	Morals as subjective or evolutionary illusions
4. Ontological	God as a maximally great being necessarily existing	Dismissal of modal logic or redefining “greatness”
5. Argument from Conscience	Conscience as the voice of a Moral Lawgiver	Conscience as cultural conditioning or brain chemistry
6. Argument from Desire	Innate longing points to transcendent fulfillment	Desires as evolutionary by-products with no real object
7. Aesthetic Argument	Beauty reflects the Creator’s glory	Beauty as a meaningless neurological trick
8. Contingency	Dependent beings require a necessary being	Infinite regress or unexplained brute facts
9. Degrees of Perfection	Graded values imply a perfect standard (God)	No real standard—just arbitrary preferences
10. Religious Experience	Billions experiencing God points to His reality	Mass delusion, psychological projection
11. History (Resurrection)	The Resurrection as a historical, miraculous event	Hallucinations, fraud, or legend theory
12. Miracles	Interventions by a supernatural agent	Coincidence, fraud, or misreporting
13. The Argument from Change	Change requires an unchanging changer	Change happens without metaphysical grounding
14. The Kalam Argument	The universe began to exist, therefore has a cause	Denial of absolute beginning or quantum fluctuation
15. Argument from Time & Eternity	Temporal reality grounded in timeless Creator	Time as brute, uncaused emergence
16. Argument from Providence	Order, purpose, and provision seen in history	History as chaotic and meaningless
17. Argument from Moral Accountability	God as Judge ensures justice	Justice is never guaranteed; evil goes unpunished
18. Argument from Meaning	Life has objective meaning rooted in God	Meaning is self-invented and ultimately illusory
19. Argument from Authority (Jesus)	Jesus’ life and claims uniquely authoritative	Jesus was deluded, mythologized, or morally flawed
20. Pascal’s Wager	Belief in God is the safer rational bet	Bet doesn’t matter because life has no ultimate stakes

What makes the Argument from Many Arguments so powerful is not merely the quantity of evidence—it is the independent and diverse origins of that evidence, all converging upon the existence of God. These are not recycled arguments. They come from physics, metaphysics, consciousness studies, moral philosophy, aesthetics, epistemology, and history.

Consider this: even if each argument were only moderately strong, the probability of them all being wrong simultaneously plummets as their number grows.

Let’s illustrate with conservative numbers.

Suppose each argument has only a 1 in 10 chance of being valid (10%). The odds of all 20 being false?

(0.9)^20 ≈ 12.2%

This means there is an 87.8% chance that at least one of these arguments is valid. But remember: all 20 point toward the same conclusion—God.

Now suppose each argument has a 50% chance of being valid. Then the odds of all 20 being false are:

(0.5)^20 = 0.000095 or 0.0095%

That is, a 99.9905% chance that at least one argument is valid—and again, they all point to God. The rational probability that all 20 converge accidentally is mathematically negligible.

However, there are more than 20 arguments for the existence of God, with some estimates placing the number at over 100 across diverse fields—philosophical, scientific, moral, historical, and experiential. What are the odds that all of them are mistaken? The skeptic bears the burden of proving each one false, because if even one holds, then the case for God’s existence is established.

Look at it this way: the chance of tossing a coin and getting heads is 50/50. Each individual toss is independent, so every time you flip it, the probability remains 50/50. But the odds of tossing a coin 100 times and getting heads every single time are not 50/50.

(Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that each of these arguments for God’s existence has only a 50% chance of being true. In fact, I believe most are far more likely true than false. This is simply an illustration to help visualize the compounding effect of probability.)

It’s actually:

(½)¹⁰⁰ =
1 in 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376

That’s roughly 1 in 1.27 nonillion.

In other words, if every grain of sand on Earth was a coin and you flipped each one every second since the beginning of the universe, you’d still almost certainly never get 100 heads in a row.

That’s why when we see multiple, independent events all aligning, we don’t say, “it’s still 50/50.” We start asking: what’s going on behind the pattern? That’s the point of the Argument from Many Arguments for God’s existence.”

In Bayesian terms, each argument updates our prior probability for theism. As Stephen Davis notes, “no one theistic argument compels assent, but the cumulative force of many such arguments makes theism more reasonable than not.”⁹

Atheism, by contrast, bears a colossal burden: it must discredit the cosmological argument, the moral argument, the resurrection, the argument from reason, the aesthetic argument, and many more—all at once. The chances of all of them being invalid, coincidental, or explained away naturally, especially when they arise from independent domains, is vanishingly small.

To visualize this, think of a twenty-petaled daisy, where each petal is an argument for God. Even if a skeptic plucks a few petals (e.g., “I reject the ontological argument”), the flower remains. It still centers on the same core: the divine.

Theism offers a unified explanatory hypothesis. Atheism offers fragmented naturalistic workarounds, each with its own problems, and lacking any overarching coherence.

As Swinburne rightly observes, “In the absence of counterevidence, it is rational to believe what multiple lines of independent evidence suggest.”¹⁰

---

Faith as Rational Trust

Faith is often caricatured as belief without evidence. But biblically and philosophically, faith is trust based on evidence. It’s the difference between blind trust and rational commitment. The Argument from Many Arguments does not demand absolute certainty—no worldview can—but it does show that theism is the most reasonable, coherent, and explanatory belief available.

Just as a jury does not need mathematical certainty to reach a verdict, neither do we. When dozens of arguments from across the philosophical and experiential spectrum all point in one direction, it is intellectually honest to follow that direction.

As Pascal said, “There is light enough for those who desire to see, and darkness enough for those of a contrary disposition.”¹¹

And so we end where we began: many arrows, one target. Not one knock-out blow, but many persuasive voices, in harmony, pointing to the God who is there and is not silent.

---

From Passive Doubt to Active Dismissal: When “Lack of Belief” Becomes Willful Resistance

Skeptics often claim that they simply “lack belief” in God. This, they argue, is a passive state—an absence of conviction rather than a denial. But there is a profound difference between not believing and refusing to believe.

As soon as someone begins actively engaging with and attempting to refute arguments for the existence of God, they have stepped beyond passivity. They are no longer indifferent or agnostic. They are now defending a counter-position—that the arguments are not just unconvincing but mistaken, and therefore that God does not exist. This is not neutrality. It is a philosophical commitment to non-theism, and it carries its own intellectual burden.

“The moment you begin to marshal counterarguments, you are no longer standing still—you are moving. And if you’re moving against the current of converging evidence, you must explain why you are swimming upstream.” — Adapted from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées

This refusal to concede even a single point eventually leads to what might better be called epistemic resistance—a posture where no evidence will ever suffice, because the conclusion has already been ruled out in principle.

Richard Dawkins, for example, once admitted in a public interview:

“Even if there were a great booming voice from the sky and the clouds parted and a golden light shone down, I still wouldn’t believe. I’d think I was hallucinating.”¹²

This is not lack of belief. It is preemptive rejection. It is the philosophical equivalent of saying, “Even if God appeared to me, I’d find a way not to believe.” That is not skepticism. That is unbelief by decree.

Others have echoed this sentiment:

• Thomas Nagel, an atheist philosopher at NYU, candidly admitted:“I want atheism to be true… I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”¹³
• Aldous Huxley, in his reflections on philosophical naturalism, wrote:“I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning… The liberation we desired was… from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.”¹⁴
• Antony Flew, one of the 20th century’s most influential atheist philosophers (who later became a theist), observed:“The debate between theism and atheism is not about the absence of evidence, but about the interpretation of evidence.”¹⁵

These statements make clear that what often presents itself as neutrality is, in fact, pre-committed resistance. When every argument is dismissed—not carefully refuted but waved away with increasing irritation—the posture shifts from thoughtful skepticism to ideological denial.

At that point, one is not lacking belief. One is actively constructing a worldview in which no argument for God can be allowed to succeed, regardless of merit.

---

Why This Matters

A courtroom analogy helps: If a juror enters the courtroom claiming to be neutral, but proceeds to reject every witness, discredit every document, and assume every piece of evidence must be flawed, we rightly question whether they are impartial. Neutrality means openness to persuasion. But dogmatic dismissal masquerading as doubt is not open-minded—it is entrenched commitment.

And it leads us to ask: What could ever convince you? If the answer is “Nothing,” then the position is not intellectual humility—it is philosophical obstinance.

---

Footnotes

1. William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008).
2. Paul Davies, The Cosmic Blueprint: New Discoveries in Nature’s Creative Ability to Order the Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988).
3. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperOne, 2001).
4. J.P. Moreland, Consciousness and the Existence of God: A Theistic Argument (New York: Routledge, 2008).
5. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 1 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982).
6. Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974).
7. C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperOne, 2001).
8. N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003).
9. Stephen T. Davis, God, Reason, and Theistic Proofs (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997).
10. Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004).
11. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. W.F. Trotter (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1958).
12. Richard Dawkins, interview in Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, directed by Nathan Frankowski (Premise Media, 2008).
13. Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
14. Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937).
15. Antony Flew and Roy Abraham Varghese, There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (New York: HarperOne, 2007).