C. S. Peirce's "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God" (1908)

Musings on the divine origin of everything.

In his 1908 essay, “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,” Charles Sanders Peirce offers a “humble hypothesis” meant to be accessible to the expert logician and clodhopper alike. God is identified as the ens necessarium, or the necessary being. This necessary being, according to Peirce, is the creator of all three (or at least two of the three, if God be third) universes of experience. These three universes are integral to Peirce's semiotic framework and correspond to what he terms firstness, secondness, and thirdness.

I examine Peirce’s categories in more depth in this essay:

But to quickly unpack Peirce’s triad for the purpose of the present study: firstness can be understood in the Platonic sense as the realm of pure ideas or possibilities, the archetypes that shine independently of any physical instantiation. Secondness refers to the realm of actuality, the brute reactive force that exists and resists the light of immediacy, seemingly dividing it from itself. Thirdness represents the realm of habits, mind, and growth—it is the domain of mediation and connection, where ideas and actualities transact and evolve, forming complex symbols.

Peirce’s approach to the God question is strikingly original. Rather than employing traditional inductive or deductive reasoning, Peirce introduces what he calls an abductive or retroductive method. This method involves a playful search for premises rather than rigid deduction or generalization. Abduction, in Peirce's view, is an immediate insight, a hypothesis that stems from an instinctual attunement to the secret meaning of surprising phenomena, whether natural or spiritual (ie, scientific or metaphysical). In the case of the “Neglected Argument,” Peirce seeks an immediate connection not just to the idea but to the reality of God, a hypothesis that he argues is coextensive with his entire logical framework. Importantly, following his Pragmaticism, if held as true or believed, we should expect that his divination of divine reality would continue to be further defined and proved evermore true by the evolving cosmos itself and by our own growth in natural and moral relation to it.

As Peirce puts it:

“this Argument should present its conclusion, not as a proposition of metaphysical theology, but in a form directly applicable to the conduct of life, and full of nutrition for man's highest growth.”

If Peirce’s argument be capable of “proof,” it is a poetic sort of proof, a truth discovered by the graceful fidelity of the well-prepared free play of imagination, only to be glimpsed in immediacy, incapable of being grasped by experiment or calculation (though it may subsequently be verified by such means). Abductive leaps do not always land, of course. The deductive and inductive stages of inquiry are essential for the elimination and avoidance of error. But neither can contribute anything to the formation of the initial hypothesis or idea. Thus, without abduction, science and logic would be incapable of taking a single step toward truth.

He continues:

“let religious meditation be allowed to grow up spontaneously out of Pure Play without any breach of continuity, and the Muser will retain the perfect candour proper to Musement. … Enter your skiff of Musement, push off into the lake of thought, and leave the breath of heaven to swell your sail. With your eyes open, awake to what is about or within you, and open conversation with yourself; for such is all meditation.”

Musement is a kind of contemplative play that allows us to explore the universes of experience—firstness, secondness, and thirdness—each on their own terms, and in their connections. Musement works more often than not as a method of hypothesis generation because our minds are instinctually attuned to the underlying Archē of the cosmos. Peirce acknowledges the Darwinian proposal that natural selection might account for the alignment between our instincts and the world. According to this view, our minds have evolved to make correct guesses because those who did so were more likely to survive and reproduce. Peirce, however, rejects this proposal as ridiculously improbable. Instead, he argues that our abductive prowess is not just a product of evolutionary happenstance but is indicative of a deeper, cosmological continuity between the minds of living organisms and their cosmic environments. Rather than explaining away our rational instinct for truth as a secondary side effect of Darwinian fitness, Peirce turns the tables by explaining the upward course of evolution as a function of the growth of Reason by way of its ever-increasing embodiment in nature. The habit-taking tendency in nature is not merely a product of natural selection (though that no doubt contributes to enhancing it!) but the ontological condition of selection.

Peirce:

“This development of Reason consists, you will observe, in embodiment, that is, in manifestation. The creation of the universe, which did not take place during a certain busy week, in the year 4004 B.C., but is going on today and never will be done, is this very developement of Reason … Under this conception, the ideal of conduct will be to execute our little function in the operation of the creation by giving a hand toward rendering the world more reasonable whenever, as the slang is, it is ‘up to us’ to do so. In logic, it will be observed that knowledge is reasonableness; and the ideal of reasoning will be to follow such methods as must develope knowledge the most speedily.” (CP 1.615, EP 2:255; 1903)

Peirce’s account of the work of Reason in nature reminds me of Whitehead’s argument in favor of acknowledging a “counter-agency” to entropy in The Function of Reason (1929). Whitehead is led to affirm a dipolar God, with a primordial pole that remains unchanged in its perfect (though unconscious) conceptual prehension of ideal possibilities and a consequent pole that consciously grows with the physical world in the course of a shared evolutionary history. Peirce shows some discomfort with the idea of a growing God, but in the end accepts it as true enough:

“this apparent attribution of growth to God, since it is ineradicable from the hypothesis, cannot, according to the hypothesis, be flatly false. Its implications concerning the Universes will be maintained in the hypothesis, while its implications concerning God will be partly disavowed, and yet held to be less false than their denial would be. Thus the hypothesis will lead to our thinking of features of each Universe as purposed; and this will stand or fall with the hypothesis. Yet a purpose essentially involves growth, and so cannot be attributed to God. Still it will, according to the hypothesis, be less false to speak so than to represent God as purposeless.”

Peirce also briefly mentions evil in a way reminiscent of Whitehead’s theodicy. The law of growth, “with all the fighting it imposes” upon us, is to be taken as a divine blessing and even as “one of the major perfections of the Universe,” part of God’s “secret design” by which the universe is perfected through our own ameliorative agency. Of course, there are those of a more pessimistic constitution who, whether due to health issues or moral revolt at the obvious injustices of life, are not as confident as Peirce in the evolutionary redemption of evil. He admits that his Neglected Argument depends in large part on an optimistic mental attitude. I’m reminded here, of course, of William James’ famous distinction in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) between the “healthy-minded” and “sick-souled.” Peirce was grateful to James for some aspects of his popularization of what Peirce first called “Pragmatism,” but he was also highly critical of James’ apparent lack of appreciation for the precise logic of his original formulation. He thus found it necessary to distinguished his own doctrine as “Pragmaticism.”

…

The remarks Peirce makes to distinguish Pragmaticism in the closing paragraphs of “A Neglected Argument” were added as what Peirce called an “Additament” in response to the Hibbert Journal editor’s request for further clarification of his position. Jon Alan Schmidt (who describes himself as a professional engineer and amateur philosopher) has published a wonderful article reflecting on the compositional and cosmological context of Peirce’s “Neglected Argument,” which I highly recommend you read: “A Neglected Additament: Peirce on Logic, Cosmology, and the Reality of God” (Signs, Vol 9, 2018). Schmidt’s analysis reveals how deeply Peirce’s cosmology and theology are intertwined with his triadic logic, suggesting that the ens necessarium is not just a theological construct but the grounding force that animates the continuity and coherence of the three universes (of possibilities, actualities, and tendencies).

As Schmidt points out, Peirce’s logic is an a priori theory of signs or theory of thinking truly that he argues underpins all scientific inquiry. Without the grounding of logic in the real idea of a necessary being, there can be no true knowledge, only belief and opinion. Thus, Peirce supports the hypothesis of God not through traditional ontological or cosmological argumentation, but on the experiential basis of an intellectual intuition that undergirds any rational inquiry. The real idea of God as ens necessarium is indispensable to the coherence of Peirce’s logical system and, if he is correct (or at least less wrong than other available accounts), to any scientific investigation.

Peirce emphasizes Galileo’s notion of the “natural light” of the human mind, arguing that this light exists within us because it exists in nature, a reflection of the continuity that he sees as a basic metaphysical fact. With proper preparation and precautions in place, we can trust our imaginations to be lured along the grain of reality because the same life animating mind also animates nature. Peirce does not neglect the importance of preparation. The well-prepared mind, through careful study of all sides of a phenomenon and a series of converging questions, is better equipped to make the right guesses.

Schmitt draws on Peirce’s other writings to lay out his theological commitments, revealing what may be some major tensions with Whitehead’s process theology. While Whitehead’s God wields only relational power to affect and be affected—essentially the power of love—Peirce maintains the classical affirmation of God as a transcendent creator. Whitehead’s rejection of omnipotence as the capacity to create from nothing leads him to conceptualize God as a relator rather than a creator; but Peirce does not follow this path. Instead, Peirce upholds the traditional omni-attributes of the divine, including omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence, while firmly distinguishing God from the universe. Peirce insists that God is not immanent in the universe but is the sole creator of all physical facts, living minds, and their ideas. This transcendent creator is said not to be a world-soul but a pure mind, an ideal possibility, a Spirit entirely incomparable to any singular existent thing. Peirce’s God here seems akin to one pole of Whitehead’s dipolar divinity, the primordial nature. Thus Peirce’s God is not subject to the brute constraints that govern the material world and so lacks “physical feelings.” A further difference is that Peirce appears to view creativity as a divine attribute, whereas Whitehead distinguishes God as creature and conditioner of creativity.

On the other hand, Peirce also locates the origins of continuity and the habit-taking tendency in the divine reality, thus nodding toward something like Whitehead’s conception of the consequent nature. God is thirdness, and so must be said to precede firstness (the realm of possibilities) and secondness (the realm of actualities) in the order of being, even if, in the order of events as we experience them, firstness precedes secondness and thirdness. In other words, it may appear from our vantage as percipients that all of the visible universe is the product of chance, collision, and statistical sorting; but Peirce does not think the pure chance of firstness could, on its own or in conjunction with the brute facts of secondness, ever give rise to laws or generals or any form of successfully or satisfyingly enduring order without some always already inborn tendency to take habits. This primordial thirdness, expressible in terms of the aim at uniformity, is indicative of the divine reality that Peirce believes permeates the cosmos (though apparently not as a world soul!).

Divinely inspired uniformity allows for the ontological continuity that makes knowledge and logic possible. Without this divine source of continuity, Peirce argues, there would be no basis for scientific inquiry or logical reasoning—only a clamoring of opinions. “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love [ie, divine continuity], I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal” (1 Corinthians 13:1). Therefore, the reality of God, as ens necessarium, is all that could justify our pursuit of true understanding of the order and intelligibility of the universe.

My concerns about Peirce’s affirmation of ex nihilo creation are complicated somewhat by his reflections on the tohu wa bohu of Genesis 1:2, which Peirce translates as “the indeterminate germinal Nothing.” This rendering resonates with process theologian Catherine Keller’s attempt to restore cocreative power to the tehom in Face of the Deep (2003). It also reminds me of evolutionary cosmologist' Brian Swimme’s “fecund nothingness” or “all-nourishing abyss”:

Schmidt points out that Peirce also compares this germinal Nothing to the Logos of John’s Gospel.

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2 He was with God in the beginning.
3 Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made.
4 In Him was life, and that life was the light of all humankind.
5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Peirce:

“If we are to explain the universe, we must assume that there was in the beginning a state of things in which there was nothing, no reaction and no quality, no matter, no consciousness, no space and no time, but just nothing at all. Not determinately nothing. For that which is determinately not A supposes the being of A in some mode. Utter indetermination. But a symbol alone is indeterminate. Therefore, Nothing, the indeterminate of the absolute beginning, is a symbol. That is the way in which the beginning of things can alone be understood. (EP 2:322; c. 1904) (Quoted by Schmidt, p. 10).

God begins as the vague potentiality of everything in general and nothing particular. Peirce describes “a contraction” of this vagueness leading “the general indefinite potentiality to become limited and heterogeneous” (CP 6.199). I hear echoes of the Cabalistic tzimtzum and of Whitehead’s account of the God-World relation. Are we to imagine that God then ends in incarnation, complete embodiment?

I cannot claim I fully understand Peirce’s theological vision. But nor, it seems, could he! The very idea, if true, is supposed to become more definite as we apply and live it, growing more real in time as the community of inquirers embody it. He appears to acknowledge the need for something like a primordial and consequent side to the divine nature, which is somehow eternal and yet capable of growth, somehow transcendent and yet also evident everywhere, third and yet also first. Perhaps incomprehensibility is the surest sign we are becoming more intimate with this divine mystery.

“the universe is a vast representamen, a great symbol of God's purpose, working out its conclusions in living realities. Now every symbol must have, organically attached to it, its Indices of Reactions and its Icons of Qualities; and such part as these reactions and these qualities play in an argument that, they of course, play in the universe—that Universe being precisely an argument … The Universe as an argument is necessarily a great work of art, a great poem—for every fine argument is a poem and a symphony— just as every true poem is a sound argument.” (CP 5.119, EP 2:193-194; 1903) (Quoted by Schmidt, p. 14)