Discussing C. S. Peirce's "Neglected Argument for the Reality of God"

Early this week, I shared some reflections on Peirce’s essay “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God.” You can read that here:

Tim and I met earlier today to discuss this essay. Peirce has both a radically original and a perennial understanding of the relationship between logic and ontology. He is defending a new kind of proof for the reality of God that is neither deductive nor inductive but rather abductive—rooted in our direct intuition and imaginal experience of ideals like Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. In Peirce’s cosmos, human imagination or “Musement” (and our scientific explication and evaluation of its speculative harvests) is continuous with nature’s spontaneous originality and order-creating tendency. In fact human imagination attuned to its own theurgic powers is just the biopsychosocial process of earthly and cosmic energetic transaction become aware of itself. One implication of Peirce’s argument is that evolutionary biology shall become the scientific study of spirit’s incarnation into flesh.

Peirce believes (at least in his brighter moods) that healthy thinking is or will be led by force of its own sound logic, careful observation, and moral pragmatism to affirm the hypothesis of God as necessary being.

Peirce’s triadic logic serves as his foundation for thinking about divine order. He is like other thinkers such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Rudolf Steiner, and Alfred North Whitehead, who sought to integrate evolutionary theory with Christianity, implying a neglected continuity between evolutionary theory and the Biblical account of the crucial role of history in mediating the God-World relationship.

Tim describes Peirce’s argument as a form of meditation, one that begins with the contemplation of phenomena, approached from different perspectives and without the urge to leap to conclusions. For Tim, this contemplative approach mirrors the essay itself, as he treats it as a living encounter with Peirce's mind, full of personality and philosophical depth. He adds that Peirce's concept of God's reality—rather than God's existence—must be understood in terms of experience and its effect on conduct, much in line with Peirce's pragmatic maxim.

Our conversation often circled around Peirce's nuanced and problematic use of the word "God"—not as a precise term but as a vernacular one, vague and unscientific, yet useful in capturing something fundamental. Peirce criticizes logicians and scientists who become atheists by trying to over-define God, missing the point of its vagueness and its role in human experience. Tim expands on this, noting that Peirce distinguishes between arguments and argumentation: arguments as signs that induce belief, but not necessarily through precisely defined premises. The "neglected argument" itself, Tim notes, is a form of abduction, which begins the process of generating premises rather than relying on pre-established ones.

Peirce argues that abduction serves as the origin of all inquiry, not just in theology but also in natural science. For Peirce, this form of reasoning allows us to reach into the origins of phenomena, and encourages our primal faith in the human capacity to interpret and communicate.

Peirce claimed that everyone—atheists included—secretly believes in God due to their inherent faith in their own capacity to think and reason. Here, Peirce’s concept of thirdness becomes particularly important, as it refers to the divine element of mind and its role in creating the other categories (firstness and secondness). Tim and I engaged in a long discussion about whether thirdness should be considered primary or whether firstness and secondness already imply it. We agree there may be tension in Peirce's thinking, as Peirce sometimes implies that chance (firstness) is sufficient for order to arise, while at other times he suggests that a pre-existing habit-taking tendency (thirdness) is necessary.

I also questioned Peirce’s description of God as the “Creator” of firstness and secondness, and his affirmation of the traditional divine attributes of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. God is a Creator ex nihilo.

And yet, Peirce suggests that God may be said to grow, contradicting the traditional notion of divine immutability. He acknowledges the inherent difficulty of reconciling a purposeful, evolving God with the notion of divine transcendence, yet leaves the tension unresolved. For Tim, this reflects Peirce's desire to have it both ways: an evolving, creative universe that hints at God’s reality without fully committing to the traditional theistic conception of God as omnipotent and immutable.

We touched on the problem of evil, which Peirce links to secondness and describes as one of the "major perfections of the universe."

I introduced Josiah Royce’s interpretation of Peirce in his two volume work The Problem of Christianity (1913), as well as his criticisms of Bergson’s account of the perception/conception dichotomy. Peirce allows us to think the firstness of impression and the secondness of reflection (or percept and concept, respectively) as always already mediated by the thirdness of interpretation.

William James’ viewed religion as primarily a solitary endeavor, which contrasts with Royce’s understanding of the centrality of the beloved community in religious life. I appreciated Tim’s emphasis on the prosaic nature of firstness: that religious experience should not be seen as the preserve of a few exceptional individuals but as something available to everyone in the everyday world. I thought of Whitehead, who in Religion in the Making further contextualized James’ idea by suggesting that religion is also about world-loyalty, tying religious experience not only to human communities but also to a deeper connectedness with the cosmos.

We linked Peirce’s thought to ancient traditions, including Kabbalah, Taoism, and hermeticism. I drew connections to thinkers like Gregory of Nyssa and Pseudo-Dionysius, who engaged in negative theology, establishing a tradition of unsaying God, which resonates with Peirce’s emphasis on vagueness. Tim brings in psychoanalytic perspectives, especially Jung and Lacan, noting how psychoanalysis, like theology, grapples with the deep structures of human meaning-making and its confrontation with trauma, alienation, and the symbolic order. Tim explores the idea of God as "insistence" rather than "existence," paralleling the way the unconscious insists through its perturbations of consciousness in psychoanalysis.

Peirce’s argument resonates with other evolutionary thinkers like Teilhard and Steiner. While the human mind is of course continuous with the many other examples of mindedness at play in natural processes all around us, there is also something unique about our capacity for conscious participation in what nature and perhaps even God undertake unconsciously. We are not just another species of animal. Steiner claimed that each human individual constitutes its own species, while Teilhard saw humanity as a new kingdom of nature. Peirce’s convergent idea of humans as generalizers and creator/discoverer of new universals sets us apart from other forms of life, echoing Hermetic and Kabbalistic traditions like the work of Pico della Mirandola, who argued that humans are not instinctually bound to any one archetype but are free to embody them all.

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