Let us now consider a series of objections to the argument just stated. I begin with what I take to be simple misunderstandings, and proceed to what I regard as more subtle and substantive objections. I have included no objections that I have not actually met, and have tried to include all that I have met from anyone even remotely sympathetic with Objectivist principles. Inevitably, some readers will complain that I have included what they regard as clearly trivial, while ignoring the real, the conclusive, the obvious objection, namely.... But that sort of dissatisfaction is inherent in any disputation that is not a direct one-to-one exchange.

  (1) The competence of our minds is an axiom; any attempted disproof is absurd.
  (2) The competence of our minds is an axiom; any attempted proof is superfluous. 
  (3) The competence of our minds is an axiom; hence every mind however produced 
  must be competent.
  (4) Design does not imply competence. 
  (5) A mind accidentally produced can still be competent (The genetic fallacy). 
  (6) Our thoughts are caused, and therefore connected to reality. 
 
  (7) Natural Selection can produce, without a designer, results that look designed
   (Psychological Darwinism). — In progress
 
  (8) The origins of consciousness are more subtle than this argument allows for.
  (9) An unchosen belief is a contradiction in terms (Psychological Darwinism). 
(10) A child comes about as a result of its parents’ having intended it. 
(11) A design explanation of man’s mind fails to explain the designer’s mind. 
 
(12) Power and goodness — In progress
(13) Error and the God of truth — In progress
(14) Omniscience is a subjectivist concept — In progress

All of the objections that we have thus far considered have one property in common. If they are valid against my argument for theism, they are equally valid against Dr. Branden’s argument for free will. Accordingly they cannot be consistently used by anyone who accepts Dr. Branden’s argument as valid. Since this paper may fall into the hands of someone who does not accept Dr. Branden’s argument, I have tried to offer a reply to each objection that stands on its own feet without reference to the Free Will Argument. But I have also referred repeatedly to the parallel. Some readers may think that I have been too repetitious. But I have reason to be. When the rough draft of this paper was circulated, two critics that I know of studied it with particular thoroughness. One of them later said to me, “You know, I read your paper at least a dozen times over the course of a year before I realized that you were claiming that your argument and the Free Will Argument were analogous, and that therefore I had no right to accept the Free Will Argument (which I do) and reject yours.” As for the other critic, no comment from him thus far has so much as acknowledged the existence of the Free Will Argument. I gather that he has not yet realized that I claim that the two arguments are analogous, and that therefore.... I am hoping that no reader of this draft will overlook that claim.

It is impossible for me to anticipate and answer every argument that any critic might have, and the reader will perhaps have thought of one not on my list. If so, the first question I have for him is: “Do you accept as sound Dr. Branden’s analysis of the epistemological self-contradictions of determinism? If you do, please re-read his analysis and explain to me how your position escapes being vulnerable to a parallel analysis — how your rebuttal of my argument does not constitution a rebuttal of his.” If you believe that your objection destroys the Designer Argument, while leaving the Free Will Argument untouched, tell me about it. If you reject the Free Will Argument, tell Dr. Branden about it.

(9) Objection that the Free Will Argument has been mis-stated (An unchosen belief is a contradiction in terms.)

Objection:
    The supposed parallel between Dr. Branden’s argument for free will and this argument for theism rests on a mis-statement of Dr. Branden’s argument. Properly stated this argument is simply that the process of concept formation is intrinsically selective, and therefore presupposes free choice. Unchosen concepts, and thus unchosen beliefs, are a contradiction in terms. To say, “I believe that X” is to say, “I choose to believe that X.” [01]

Reply:
    That there is no parallel between my argument and the critic’s version of Dr. Branden’s argument I firmly grant. That his argument is Dr. Branden’s argument I firmly deny. Once again, I refer the reader to the argument as quoted in the opening pages of this paper (and to the original sources, that he may see that I am not ignoring the context). Dr. Branden says:

  If this [determinism] were true.... No theory could claim greater plausibility than any other theory.
  But if man believes what he has to believe ... then he can never know if his conclusions are true or false.
  If his capacity to judge is not free, there is no way for a man to discriminate between his beliefs and those of a raving lunatic.
  They [determinists] cannot claim to know that their theory is true; they can only report that they feel helpless to believe otherwise.
  Their beliefs are no more subject to their control than a lunatic’s.
  Only because man is a being of volitional consciousness — only because he is free to initiate and sustain a reasoning process, is conceptual knowledge — in contradistinction to irresistible unchosen beliefs — possible to him. [02]

Surely it is sufficiently clear that Dr. Branden is not arguing that unchosen beliefs are a contradiction in terms. On the contrary, he states that lunatics have unchosen beliefs. His contention is rather that, to the extent to which a man’s judgements are not subject to his control, that man has no evidence of the nature of reality.

The alternate argument may be useful to someone who wishes to reject Dr. Branden’s argument and still have some argument for free will in his armory. He will still have to refute both Dr. Branden and me.

(10) Objection that design equals Planned Parenthood

Objection:
    I do not understand this argument at all. My mind is he product of design. When I was conceived, my parents were deliberately trying to produce a baby. Therefore, I cam about as the result of their intending it. But I was supposed to be an only child. My mother#&146;s second pregnancy was a distinct surprise. Thus my younger brother’s mind is the product of accident. He came about not as the result of anyone’s intention. Strangely enough, however, most people think us both to be quite rational and competent to deal with reality.

Reply:
    The critic’s parents’ choice accounts for his having been conceived and born. But they did not choose his sex or his eye color or his innate intelligence. They neither designed nor fully understood either their own brain structure of the genetic code that directed the development of a similar structure in their offspring. Their role is analogous to that of a clerk photocopying a page of scientific formulas without understanding either the formulas or the photocopying process. The clerk is responsible for our having a particular page of formulas in our hands, but not for the accuracy or insightfulness of those formulas. The critic is quite correct. He does not understand the argument at all.

(11) A series of designers? The Ultimate Designer, omniscience, necessity, timelessness, and uniqueness

At this point a critic may say: “If a designer made my mind, then who made his mind? Did it come about by accident or design? If by accident, then his thoughts are not evidence of the nature of reality, and by derivation neither are mine. If by design, then you have merely put the problem back one more stage. Are you going to ask us to believe in an infinite series of designers, each created by the previous one?”

In fact, this is not the line I intend to take. I cannot see that an infinite chain of designers provides us with any help. Suppose I tell you that there is intelligent life on Mars, and you ask me how I know, and I answer, “I heard it from my professor.” You then ask me how my professor knows, and I say, “He heard it from his professor.” Further questions establish that I am supposing this information to have been passed down from professor to student an infinite number of times. Now quite apart from your doubts that professors have always been around, I think you would find this an insufficient reason for accepting the statement about Mars. You would say that a false statement can travel down an infinite chain just as readily as a true one, and that if each professor is simply passing on, uncritically, what was told to him, then we have no grounds for supposing the statement to be true. I agree. The same thing applies if we suppose that there is one professor who has lived an infinite time and has always known that there is life on Mars. Only a habitual respect for the wisdom of age hinders us from seeing at once that an infinitely old professor could have been wrong all his life just as easily as right all his life.

It would thus seem that we have reached a dead end. An infinite series does not help, and a finite series leaves us with a problem about the origin of the mind of the first designer which is just as pressing as the problem about the origins of our own minds. Did the first mind originate by accident or design?

However, there is one context in which the problem does not arise. One thing about which I am never mistaken, about which it is impossible for me to be mistaken, is the content of my consciousness at this moment. If someone tells me that there is not really a bug biting the back of my neck, it just feels as if there is, I grant that he may be right. But if he tells me that I am not really experiencing discomfort, it just feels as if I am, then I know he is wrong. If pain is an illusion, it is a painful illusion. The man who says, “I see an elephant in the shrubbery,” is probably wrong. A man who says, “I see red spots,” may possibly be lying, but he is not mistaken. If he thinks he sees red spots, then he is seeing red spots. Period. To say, “Jones feels a tickling sensation,” and to say, “Jones seems to himself to feel a tickling sensation,” is to say the same thing twice in different words.

Now, I maintain that the only hypothesis about the origin of our minds that is consistent with Objectivist principles is that they were designed, either directly or at several removes, by an Ultimate Designer whose mind is related to the whole of reality as a man’s mind is to the content of his consciousness. Thus, his judgements about reality are always correct, and there is no need to account for that correctness, any more than there is any need to account for the fact that the number six is such an amazingly close approximation to the number six. It is not just that he is always right. That would be ordinary run-of-the-mill omniscience. The Ultimate Designer has logical or necessary omniscience. To say, “Such-and-such is true,” and, “The Ultimate Designer believes that such-and-such is true,” is to say the same thing twice in different words.

Now to say, “Jones believes such-and-such,” and, ”Jones believed such-and-such yesterday,” is not to say the same thing in different words. Jones may have changed his mind between yesterday and today. Jones is a being with a history. Jones is subject to change. Jones has duration — is spread out in time. Jones has, in summary, not merely a consciousness, but a temporal consciousness. If we suppose that the Ultimate Designer has a temporal consciousness, we run into intolerable difficulties. If today he remembers that Napoleon died at St. Helena, but tomorrow forgets this, will the statement that Napoleon died at St. Helena, although true today, become false tomorrow? We are forced to conclude that the Ultimate Designer does not have duration. I remind you of Dr. Branden’s remark in Lecture Four: “Time is in the Universe, the Universe is not in Time.” [03] Time and space are not some huge container into which all of reality, every material object, every mind, every entity, must be fitted. They are the network of spatial and temporal relationships that exist among material objects and events. A writer, in writing a novel, creates not only characters and events but also their relationships to each other, spatial, temporal, causal, personal. But the framework of the novel, with all the pieces that that framework holds together, is in the mind of the author. The author, unlike the Ultimate Designer, does have duration, but not duration in the time-series of the book. One does not ask, “How old was Dagny Taggart when Ayn Rand first got the idea for Atlas Shrugged?”

The argument for timelessness is also an argument for uniqueness. If A and B are both Ultimate Designers, then the statements “A believes that X” and “B believes that X” are synonymous with “X” and so with one another. But this implies that A and B are the same entity.

We conclude that there exists one and only one being who is necessarily omniscient, timeless, and the ultimate designer of our minds, either directly or through a finite series of intermediate designers. I propose hereafter to refer to this being as “God.” (I shall sometimes refer to “God” as “him,” not because of my views on God, but because of my views on English grammar, as in, “Does everyone have his notebook?” — not “his-or-her notebook” or “their notebook.”) 

References
[Editor’s notes are in blue.]

* The title refers to Nathaniel Branden’s lecture “The Concept of God,” from his lecture series “The Basic Principles of Objectivism.” That lecture is fully transcribed in his book The Vision of Ayn Rand: The Basic Principles of Objectivism (Gilbert, Ariz.: Cobden Press, 2009), chapter 4. Partial and perhaps complete audios seem to be available throughout the Internet, especially here. See also R.A. Childs, “The Epistemological Basis of Anarchism,” Note 19.

[01] Mr. Crim writes:

    Branden goes on to argue that consciousness in man involves the existence of rationality and that a derivative of this existence is volition — man’s free will (Nathaniel Branden, The Psychology of Self-Esteem, Nash (Los Angeles, 1969), pp. 25-49). Rationality is the process of concept formation, the mental process of isolating and integrating the characteristics of existents, and may be referred to as a systematic succession of choices — beginning with the first choice, which is to make choices. Thus, we see that volition is a psychoepistemological process, that a rational being must be a volitional being. [This is probably Mr. Robert Crim, cited in the “Natural Selection” section, but the quotation is not taken from the source cited there. I have been unable to find the source, and it is at least possible that it comes from private correspondence.]

[02] N. Branden, “The Contradiction of Determinism,” 2/5/17, 19, 20. Extracts quoted are from 17gg, 17hh, 17ii-19gg, 19hh, 19ii-kk, 20b, 20b-c, 20aa-bb. [References of this form refer to The Objectivist Newsletter, so that volume 2, number 5 would be May 1963. After volume 4, the name of the publication was The Objectivist. The page numbers for the latter are those of the original format, not those in the bound volume. In this case, the page numbers are correct; the line numbering is not clear.] The reader is urged to study the whole of this eloquent defense of human freedom and rationality. It is reproduced, with minor changes, Dr. Branden’s book, The Psychology of Self-Esteem (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), chapter 4, section 3 (pp. 53-57). [The argument is also included in both The Vision of Ayn Rand, pp. 136-38 and on-line here, starting at 2:40 and continuing to the end of the recording.]

[03] N. Branden, “The Concept of God,” in The Vision of Ayn Rand, pp. 101-102. Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSyo7T_TUHE, 27:27-27:53.