God, Arguments for the Existence of

Existence of God arguments have been proposed by philosophers, theologians, and other thinkers. In philosophical terminology, existence of God arguments concern schools of thought on the epistemology of the ontology of God.

Philosophical issues

What is God? (Definition of God's existence)

A fundamental way to assess the validity of any argument for the existence of God is to examine the characteristics of that God. That is, we might ask "What is God?"

One approach to this problem, following the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein would be to attempt to extract a definition of "God" from the way that particular word is used. How do we use the word "God"? What do we mean by "God" or "gods"? However this line of questioning runs immediately into trouble if it tries to give a universal notion of "God", since that word (and its equivalent in other languages) have been used in very different ways throughout human history.

Today in the West, the term "God" typically refers to a monotheistic concept of a Supreme Being, that is being unlike any other being. Classical theism asserts that God possesses every possible perfection, including such qualities as omniscience, omnipotence, and perfect benevolence. Of course this definition is not the only possible definition of "god".

In the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism, reality is ultimately seen as being a single, qualityless, changeless being called nirguna Brahman. However, nirguna Brahman is understood to be beyond "ordinary" human comprehension. What we ordinarily perceive, that is a world of many things, is brought on by consequences of our actions, and it is difficult, if not impossible, to conceive of nirguna Brahman. Thus, Advaitin philosophy introduces the concept of saguna Brahman or Ishvara as a way of talking about Brahman to people. Ishvara, in turn, is ascribed such qualities as omniscience, omnipotence, and benevolence.

Polytheistic religions use the word "god" for multiple beings with varying degrees of power and abilities. Some stories such as those of Homer and Ovid portray gods arguing with, tricking and fighting with one another. The length of time that these conflicts take place over (for example: the ten years of the Trojan War) implies that none of these deities are omnipotent nor absolutely benevolent.

The problem of the supernatural

One problem immediately posed by the question of the existence of a God is that traditional beliefs usually grant God various supernatural powers. Supernatural beings may be able to conceal and reveal themselves for their own purposes, as for example in the tale of Baucis and Philemon.

Religious apologists offer the supernatural abilities of God as explanation of the inability of empirical methods to prove God's existence. In Karl Popper's philosophy of science, the assertion of the existence of a supernatural God would be a non-falsifiable hypothesis, not amenable to scientific investigation.

Proponents of intelligent design (I.D.) believe there is empirical evidence pointing to the existence of an intelligent creator, though their claims are challenged by the scientific community. The counterargument is that I.D. typically relies on a shrinking pool of arguments related to the Fine-tuning problem, which have not yet been resolved by natural explanations, so that the creator implied by I.D. equates to the pejorative God of the gaps.

Logical positivists, such as Rudolph Carnap and A. J. Ayer view any talk of gods as literally nonsense. For the logical positivists and adherents of similar schools of thought, statements about religious or other transcendent experiences could not have a truth value, and were deemed to be without meaning.

Epistemology

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy which studies the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge. One can not be said to "know" something just because one believes it. Knowledge is, from an epistemological standpoint, distinguished from belief by justification.

Knowledge in the sense of "understanding of a fact or truth" can be divided in a posteriori knowledge, based on experience or deduction (see methodology), and a priori knowledge from introspection, axioms or self-evidence. Knowledge can also be described as a psychological state, since in a strict sense there can never be a posteriori knowledge proper (see relativism). Much of the disagreement about "proofs" of God's existence is due to different conceptions not only of the term "God" but also the terms "proof", "truth" and "knowledge". Religious belief from revelation or enlightenment (satori) falls in the second, a priori class of "knowledge".

Different conclusions as to the existence of God often rest on different criteria for deciding what methods are appropriate for deciding if something is true or not; some examples include

• whether logic counts as evidence concerning the quality of existence
• whether subjective experience count as evidence for objective reality
• whether either logic or evidence can rule in or out the supernatural.

Arguments for the existence of God

A dispute arose as to whether there are a number of proofs of the existence of God or whether all are not merely parts of one and the same proof . While all such proofs would end in the same way, by asserting the existence of God, they do not all start at the same place. St. Thomas calls them aptly Viæ: roads to the apprehension of God which all open on the same highway.

Metaphysical arguments (for)

Metaphysical arguments for the existence of God are arguments that seek to prove the logical necessity of a being with at least one attribute that only God could have.

• The Cosmological argument, which argues that God must have been around at the start of things in order to be the "first cause".
• The Ontological argument, based on arguments about the "being which nothing greater-than can be conceived".

In theology and the philosophy of religion, an ontological argument for the existence of God is an argument that God's existence can be proved a priori, that is, by intuition and reason alone. In the context of the Abrahamic religions, it was first proposed by the medieval philosopher Anselm of Canterbury in his Proslogion, and important variations have been developed by philosophers such as René Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, Norman Malcolm, Charles Hartshorne, and Alvin Plantinga. A modal logic version of the argument was devised by mathematician Kurt Gödel. The ontological argument has been controversial in philosophy and many philosophers have famously criticized or opposed it, including Anselm's contemporary Gaunilo of Marmoutiers, as well as David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Gottlob Frege. Some of these opponents have preferred to rely on cosmological arguments for the existence of God instead.

The argument works by examining the concept of God, and arguing that it implies the actual existence of God; that is, if we can conceive of God, then God exists — it is thus self-contradictory to state that God does not exist. This is obviously a controversial position, and the ontological argument has a long history of detractors and defenders.

The argument's different versions arise mainly from using different concepts of God as the starting point. For example, Anselm starts with the notion of God as a being than which no greater can be conceived, while Descartes starts with the notion of God as being maximally perfect (as having all perfections).

Ontological argument

Anselm's argument

The ontological argument was first proposed by Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) in Chapter 2 of the Proslogion. While Anselm did not propose an ontological system, he was very much concerned with the nature of being. He argued that there are necessary beings – things that cannot not exist – and contingent beings – things that may or may not exist, but whose existence is not necessary.

Anselm presents the ontological argument as part of a prayer directed to God. He starts with a definition of God, or a necessary assumption about the nature of God, or perhaps both.

"Now we believe that [the Lord] is something than which nothing greater can be imagined."

Then Anselm asks: does God exist?

"Then is there no such nature, since the fool has said in his heart: God is not?"

To answer this, first he tries to show that God exists 'in the understanding':

"But certainly this same fool, when he hears this very thing that I am saying – something than which nothing greater can be imagined – understands what he hears; and what he understands is in his understanding, even if he does not understand that it is. For it is one thing for a thing to be in the understanding and another to understand that a thing is."

Anselm goes on to justify his assumption, using the analogy of a painter:

"For when a painter imagines beforehand what he is going to make, he has in his understanding what he has not yet made but he does not yet understand that it is. But when he has already painted it, he both has in his understanding what he has already painted and understands that it is.

"Therefore even the fool is bound to agree that there is at least in the understanding something than which nothing greater can be imagined, because when he hears this he understands it, and whatever is understood is in the understanding."

Now Anselm introduces another assumption:

"And certainly that than which a greater cannot be imagined cannot be in the understanding alone. For if it is at least in the understanding alone, it can be imagined to be in reality too, which is greater."

(For example, most people would prefer a real £100 rather than an imaginary £100.)

"Therefore if that than which a greater cannot be imagined is in the understanding alone, that very thing than which a greater cannot be imagined is something than which a greater can be imagined. But certainly this cannot be."

Anselm has thus found a contradiction, and from that contradiction, he draws his conclusion:

"There exists, therefore, beyond doubt something than which a greater cannot be imagined, both in the understanding and in reality."

Philosophical assumptions underlying the argument

In order to understand the place this argument has in the history of philosophy, it is important to understand the essence of the argument in the context of the Influence of Hellenic philosophy on Christianity.

First, it is important to realize that Anselm's argument stemmed from the philosophical school of Realism. Realism was the dominant philosophical school of Anselm's day. According to Realism, and in contrast to Nominalism, things such as "greenness" and "bigness" were known as universals, which had a real existence outside the human imagination, in an abstract realm, as described by Plato. Accordingly, if a concept could be formed in the human mind (as was his concept of God), then it had a real existence in the abstract realm of the universals, apart from his imagination. In essence, if he could imagine God, God existed.

Secondly, it is important to understand Anselm's concept of "perfections" (and that of later writers, up to about the late seventeenth century). A perfection is a property that has been completed; thus, power is a property, but complete (absolute, unlimited) power is a perfection. The term later came to be used almost completely evaluatively, to mean something like the absolute best, the best possible (Baruch Spinoza complains about this change in his Ethics), and it has thus become an error to talk about one thing being more perfect than another. For writers like Anselm and Descartes, however, "more perfect" simply meant 'more complete', so that perfections come in degrees. The old meaning of 'perfect' survives in music (e.g., "perfect cadence"), grammar (the perfect tenses), and in phrases such as "a perfect stranger".

Thirdly, it is important to understand Anselm's concept of "necessary existence". Anselm held that there were two types of existence: necessary existence and contingent existence. Contingent existence is a state of existence which depends on something else — that is, if something else were not the case, the object in question would not exist. Necessary existence, by contrast, depends on nothing. Something that necessarily exists will exist no matter what. It can't not exist.

A modern description of the argument

Here's a short, and very general description of the ontological argument:

1. God is the greatest possible being and thus possesses all perfections.
2. Existence is a perfection.
3. God exists.

This is a shorter modern version of the argument. Anselm framed the argument as a reductio ad absurdum wherein he tried to show that the assumption that God does not exist leads to a logical contradiction. The following steps more closely follow Anselm's line of reasoning:

1. God is the entity than which no greater entity can be conceived.
2. The concept of God exists in human understanding.
3. God does not exist in reality (assumed in order to refute).
4. The concept of God existing in reality exists in human understanding.
5. If an entity exists in reality and in human understanding, this entity is greater than it would have been if it existed only in human understanding (a statement of existence as a perfection).
6. from 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 An entity can be conceived which is greater than God, the entity than which no greater entity can be conceived (logical self-contradiction).
7. Assumption 3 is wrong, therefore God exists in reality (assuming 1, 2, 4, and 5 are accepted as true).

Anselm in his Proslogon 3 made another a priori argument for God this time based on the idea of necessary existence. He claimed that if God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, it is better to be necessary than contingent. Therefore God must be necessary, to sum it up:

1. God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived.
2. It is greater to be necessary than not.
3. God must be necessary.
4. God exists

Gaunilo's island

One of the earliest recorded objections to Anselm's argument was raised by one of Anselm's contemporaries, Gaunilo. Gaunilo invited his readers to think of the greatest, or most perfect, conceivable island. As a matter of fact, it is likely that no such island actually exists. However, his argument would then say that we aren't thinking of the greatest conceivable island, because the greatest conceivable island would exist, as well as having all those other desirable properties. Since we can conceive of this greatest or most perfect conceivable island, then it must exist. While this argument seems absurd, Gaunilo claims that it is no more so than Anselm's.

Such objections are known as "Overload Objections"; they don't claim to show where or how the ontological argument goes wrong, they simply argue that if it is sound, then so are many other arguments of the same logical form which we don't want to accept, arguments which would overload the world with an indefinitely large number of things like perfect islands, perfect pizzas, perfect pencils, etc.

Such objections always depend upon the accuracy of the analogy. That is, we must be able to show that the objector's argument is sufficiently like the ontological argument for us to be able to conclude that if one works so must the other. There are at least two problems with Gaunilo's version, though. First, what exactly is the concept of the perfect island — the island than which no greater can be conceived? In any group of people, there will be disagreements as to what makes an island perfect; there will be different preferences concerning size, climate, inhabitants, food-availability, etc. There is no single concept of a perfect island, because perfection here can only mean what is perfect for us, rather than perfect in itself. The notion of the perfect being, however, isn't relativised to any individual; it's the notion of a being that is maximally great — not for me or for you, but great, full stop.

It might be objected that "perfection" is also a culturally relative notion, so that Anselm's argument faces exactly the same problem as Gaunilo's. As we have seen, however, Anselm and Descartes use "perfection" not (primarily) evaluatively, but to refer to God's having complete or total properties. Moreover, it isn't necessary to say what the properties are in order for the argument to go through; we only need to consider the concept of a being that has all perfections (whatever they may be). Then again, some properties might lead to contradictions in the same object. For example, it is not impossible to think of utter malice as evil's perfection, which one would be hard-pressed to combine with superlative goodness. Or consider the case of "sober-minded" and "poetically-minded." Both are presumably good qualities, yet incompatible even outside of superlatives.

Gaunilo might have added that he means to refer to an island that is perfect in itself, without reference to us. Now, what is an island? It's a body of land surrounded by water. But every island is a body of land surrounded by water (if it weren't, it wouldn't be an island); so every island is a perfect island (every island is perfectly an island). Here, the disanalogy arises because whatever example Gaunilo chooses, it will be a being of a particular type – such a pizza, a pencil, or a Prime Minister – and so its perfection will be relative to that type. In the case of Anselm's premise, though, we're not concerned with a being of this type or that type, but just with a being — a being than which no greater can be conceived.

On the other hand, what is a being that has no specific properties? And is it more conceivable than the perfect island? Bishop Berkeley insisted five centuries later that an abstract triangle, a triangle of no specific proportions and angles is a non-entity, unimaginable, an empty sound. Now "a being" is conceivable, though not picturable, in that we understand the word and its use. But any attempt to endow the concept with content leads to particular properties and particular beings. We may wonder, then, whether "perfect being" is more than a by-product of grammar.

Necessary nonexistence

Another rationale is attributed to Melbourne philosopher Douglas Gasking (1911–1994), one component of his proof of the nonexistence of God:

1. The creation of the world is the most marvelous achievement imaginable.
2. The merit of an achievement is the product of (a) its intrinsic quality, and (b) the ability of its creator.
3. The greater the disability (or handicap) of the creator, the more impressive the achievement.
4. The most formidable handicap for a creator would be non-existence.
5. Therefore if we suppose that the universe is the product of an existent creator we can conceive a greater being — namely, one who created everything while not existing.
6. Therefore God does not exist.

Gasking was apparently thinking of the "world" or "universe" as the same as "everything." The proof is strengthened if "everything" is substituted. However, defenders of Anselm would reject the thesis that disability and handicap are things that make a creator greater.

Existence as a property

Another traditional criticism of the argument (first found in Gassendi's Objections to Descartes' Meditations, and later modified by Kant) is that existence is not a perfection, because existence is not a property as such, and that referring to it as a property confuses the distinction between a concept of something and the thing itself. The argument is that anything which has the property of being non-existent could not possibly have any other properties, being non-existent, and thus not having color, location, or any other property. One cannot, the argument says, speak meaningfully of the non-existent apple that one is holding, saying that it is red, crisp, weighs a certain amount, is in one's right hand, and does not exist. Another way of phrasing this is that, if existence is a property, then there exist a number of things that have the property of not existing.

Miscellaneous

A fourth criticism of Anselm's argument rests on the claim that, even if existence is a property, it is still not a perfection because existence is either true or false while degree of perfection is a continuous scale. Defenders of the ontological argument have replied to this objection that its conclusion does not follow from its premise.

A fifth criticism is that the choice of "God" as the term for the perfect being is misleading, and invites the reader to substitute a particular culturally-determined deity for the perfect being used in the argument. This criticism does not directly contradict the validity of the argument but instead suggests that using the ontological argument to demonstrate the existence of a particular deity involves a fallacy of equivocation.

A sixth criticism is that Anselm's "fool" does not necessarily understand some object when he hears the words "a thing greater than which nothing can be imagined". He might understand the meaning of the words, but it does not follow from this that even a single mental object exists, even if purely in his mind, of which these words are true. According to this criticism, "I understand some given description" does not imply "I can imagine something that fits the given description". For example if one were to hear the words "a thing that is at the same time pink and invisible" it does not follow from understanding the words that one then has a mental concept of such a thing.

A seventh criticism comes from analyses, and is related to the idea that existence is not a property. Anselm's argument could be put as "there is x, such that x is all perfections; existence is a perfection, therefore x must exist". We can call this simply C(x) (a proposition in which x is a constituent). But, the fool could ask, for what value of x will C(x) be true?

An eighth criticism of Anselm's argument attacks the premise which implies that one must conceive of the greatest conceivable being (God.) The criticism is that the greatest conceivable being is in fact inconceivable, as it lacks a required property of the GCB, existence outside of the mind. To give a parallel, if a person could not conceive of dragons, and wanted to conceive of a three-headed dragon, it would not be possible for him to do so as a requirement for conceiving of a three-headed dragon is to be able to conceive of the inconceivable dragon. Thus, the argument that the greatest conceivable being must exist in order to achieve its greatest potential is defeated in its premise on the fact that this object is not conceivable. This criticism also concludes that all conceived objects are inconceivable (or at least not at their greatest conceivability) as in a priori the required property of existence is absent.

Hume

Hume claimed that nothing could ever be proven to exist through an a priori, rational argument by arguing as follows:

1. The only way to prove anything a priori is through an opposite contradiction. For example, I am a married bachelor.
2. The resulting contradiction makes something inconceivable. Obviously it is impossible to have a married bachelor.
3. It is possible to comprehend anything not existing. Thus it is not inconceivable to imagine anything not existing.
4. Nothing can be proven to exist a priori. Including God.

Revisionists

Obviously Anselm thought this argument was valid and persuasive, and it still has occasional defenders, but many, perhaps most, contemporary philosophers believe that the ontological argument, at least as Anselm articulated it, does not stand up to strict logical scrutiny. Others, like Gottfried Leibniz, Norman Malcolm, Charles Hartshorne, Kurt Gödel and Alvin Plantinga have reformulated the argument in an attempt to revive it.

Descartes' ontological arguments

René Descartes (1596-1650) composed a number of ontological arguments which differed from Anselm's formulation in important ways. Generally speaking, it is less a formal argument than a natural intuition.

Descartes wrote in the Fifth Meditation:

But if the mere fact that I can produce from my thought the idea of something entails that everything which I clearly and distinctly perceive to belong to that thing really does belong to it, is not this a possible basis for another argument to prove the existence of God? Certainly, the idea of God, or a supremely perfect being, is one that I find within me just as surely as the idea of any shape or number. And my understanding that it belongs to his nature that he always exists is no less clear and distinct than is the case when I prove of any shape or number that some property belongs to its nature (AT 7:65; CSM 2:45).

The intuition above can be formally described as follows:

1. Whatever I clearly and distinctly perceive to be contained in the idea of something is true of that thing.
2. I clearly and distinctly perceive that necessary existence is contained in the idea of God.
3. Therefore, God exists.

The key premise to the argument is the first premise, which is, in essence, a statement of faith in his intuition.

Another formulation of his argument is as follows:

1. I exist
2. I have an idea of a supremely perfect being, i.e. a being having all perfections.
3. As an imperfect being I would be unable to create such a concept.
4. The concept must have come from God.
5. To be a perfect being God must exist.
6. God exists.

In another, less formal statement of his argument, he draws an analogy between belief in the existence of God and the geometric demonstration:

Whatever method of proof I use, I am always brought back to the fact that it is only what I clearly and distinctly perceive that completely convinces me. Some of the things I clearly and distinctly perceive are obvious to everyone, while others are discovered only by those who look more closely and investigate more carefully; but once they have been discovered, the latter are judged to be just as certain as the former. In the case of a right-angled triangle, for example, the fact that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the square on the other two sides is not so readily apparent as the fact that the hypotenuse subtends the largest angle; but once one has seen it, one believes it just as strongly. But as regards God, if I were not overwhelmed by philosophical prejudices, and if the images of things perceived by the senses did not besiege my thought on every side, I would certainly acknowledge him sooner and more easily than anything else. For what is more manifest than the fact that the supreme being exists, or that God, to whose essence alone existence belongs, exists? (AT 7:68-69; CSM 2:47)

Plantinga's modal form and contemporary discussion

Alvin Plantinga has given us another version of the argument, one where the conclusion follows from the premises, assuming axiom S5 of modal logic. A version of his argument is as follows:

1. By definition a maximally great being is one that exists necessarily and necessarily is omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good. (Premise)
2. Possibly a maximally great being exists. (Premise)
3. Therefore, possibly it is necessarily true that an omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good being exists (By 1 and 2)
4. Therefore, it is necessarily true that an omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good being exists. (By 3 and S5)
5. Therefore, an omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good being exists. (By 4 and since necessarily true propositions are true.)

The axiom S5 says that if a proposition is possibly necessarily true, then it is necessarily true.

Plantinga's ontological argument has two controversial premises: The axiom S5 and the "possibility premise" that a maximally great being is possible. Given these, the conclusion indisputably follows. The more controversial of these two is the "possibility premise" since S5 is widely (though not universally) accepted. Some critics (e.g., Richard M. Gale) have even argued that the "possibility premise" begs the question, because one only has the epistemic right to accept it if one understands the nested modal operators, and if one understands them then one understands that "possibly necessarily" is basically the same as "necessarily".

The crucial question is whether the possibility premise can be justified. The problem is a thorny one, since none of the more reliable of our ways of showing something to be possible appear applicable:

1. We might show a proposition to be possible by showing that it is true. Thus, we know that consciousness is possible because we know that we have consciousness.
2. We can show a state of affairs to be possible by exhibiting how the state of affairs might arise by the laws of nature from other possible states of affairs. That is how we know that horse-like mammals with one horn are possible, since we can sketch an evolutionary story whereby they physically could evolve.
3. We might provide a mathematical or other model of the situation to be shown to be possible, a model that mirrors all the relevant logical structure of the situation, and show the model to be possible. This is how we know that it is possible to have three people where there are two fathers and two sons—we construct a model in our minds in which there is a grandfather, his son and his son's son.

However, it does not appear that any of these approaches has any hope in the case of the ontological argument's possibility premise. The first option would be blatant question-begging. The second is inapplicable since at least as far as we know a maximally great being cannot arise from anything else. And the third option would require us to have a full grasp of the logical structure of a maximally great being.

There are, however, some less reliable ways of showing something to be possible. We might simply have a modal "intuition" about the possibility of something. Such intuitions are highly fallible, but may carry some epistemic weight. The disadvantage of this method is that it may not be possible for someone who shares the intuition to convince another.

Or one might do this on a social and not individual level and argue (this follows ideas of Richard M. Gale, though it does not appear likely that he would endorse this application) that when a concept has been in play for centuries in a well-developed language game, such as the concept of a maximally great being in the religious language game, that the concept has some likelihood of being coherent and hence possible. Again, the weight that such a historical claim carries is not very great since we can make mistakes about it. Thus, before Cantor, people may have thought that the idea of a collection than which a greater collection is impossible was coherent, while Cantor's diagonal argument suggests otherwise). Still, the history of a concept's use may provide some evidence in favor of the possibility of that which the concept purports to be of.

There are, nonetheless, yet other approaches to the possibility premise. Leibniz thought that the possibility premise followed from the claim that "positive qualities" could not logically conflict with one another, and hence the notion of a being that had all the positive qualities had to be coherent. Gödel's ontological proof uses similar ideas.

A very different approach has recently been attempted by Pruss who starts with the 8th-9th century AD Indian philosopher Samkara's dictum that if something is impossible, then we cannot have a perception (even a non-veridical one) that it is the case. Contraposing, it follows that if we have a perception that p, then even though it might not be the case that p, it is at least the case that possibly p. If mystics in fact perceive the existence of a maximally great being, it follows that the existence of a maximally great being is at least possible. And that is all that is needed to get the modal ontological argument off the ground. One difficulty in this argument is that one might misinterpret the content of one's experience, and hence the mystic might be incorrect even in a cautious description of an experience as an experience "as of a maximally great being."

Interestingly, Plantinga himself does not think the modal ontological argument is always a good proof of the existence of God. It depends on what his interlocutor thinks of the possibility premise. Nonetheless, Plantinga has suggested that because we do not have any evidence against the possibility premise, it might be reasonable to suppose it has probability 1/2. It follows from this that the existence of God can at the outset be held to have probability 1/2, though further evidence may increase or decrease this.

Cosmological argument

The cosmological argument is an argument for the existence of God, also traditionally known as an "argument from universal causation," an "argument from first cause," and also as the "uncaused cause" argument. Whichever term is used, there are three basic variants of this argument, each with subtle but important distinctions: the argument from causation in esse, the argument from causation in fieri, and the argument from contingency. The cosmological argument does not attempt to prove anything about the first cause or about God, except to argue that such a cause must exist.

Origins of the argument

Plato and Aristotle both posited first cause arguments, though each with certain notable caveats. Plato (c. 427–c. 347 B.C.E.) posited a "demiurge" of supreme wisdom and intelligence as the creator of the cosmos in his work Timaeus. For Plato, the demiurge lacked the supernatural ability to create ex nihilo or out of nothing. The demiurge was only able to organize the "anake." The anake was the only other co-existent element or presence in Plato's cosmogony.

Aristotle (c. 384–322 B.C.E.) also put forth the idea of a creator of the cosmos, often referred to as the "Prime Mover" in his work Metaphysics. For Aristotle too, as for Plato, the underlying "stuff" of the universe always was in existence and always would be (which in turn follows Parmenides' famous statement that "nothing can come from nothing"). Aristotle posited an underlying ousia (an essence or substance) of which the universe is composed, and it is the ousia which the Prime Mover organized and set into motion.

Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225 – 1274 C.E.), probably the best known theologian of the Middle Ages, adapted the argument he found in his reading of Aristotle to form one of the earliest and the most influential versions of the cosmological argument. His conception of first cause is the idea that the universe must have been caused by something which was itself uncaused, which he asserted was God.

Countless other philosophers and theologians have posited first-cause arguments both before and since Aquinas. The versions sampled in the following sections are representative of the most common derivations of the argument.

The argument

Framed as a formal proof, the first cause argument can be stated as follows:

1. Every effect has a cause(s).
2. Nothing can cause itself.
3. A causal chain cannot be of infinite length.
4. Therefore, there must be a first cause; or, there must be something which is not an effect.

The cosmological argument can only speculate about the existence of God from claims about the entire universe, unless the "first cause" is taken to mean the same thing as "God." Thus, the argument is based on the claim that God must exist due to the fact that the universe needs a cause. In other words, the existence of the universe requires an explanation, and an active creation of the universe by a being outside of the universe—generally assumed to be God—is that explanation.

In light of the Big Bang theory, a stylized version of cosmological argument for the existence of God has emerged (sometimes called the Kalam cosmological argument, the following form of which was put forth by William Lane Craig):

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe had a cause.

A more detailed discussion of the argument

A basic explanation might go something like this: Consider some event in the universe. Whatever event you choose, it will be the result of some cause, or more likely a very complex set of causes. Each of those causes would be the result of some other set of causes, which are in turn a result of yet other causes. Thus there is an enormous chain of events in the universe, with the earlier events causing the later events. And either this chain of events has a beginning, or it does not.

Currently, the theory of the cosmological history of the universe most widely accepted by astronomers and astrophysicists includes an apparent first event—the Big Bang—the expansion of all known matter and energy from a superdense, singular point at some finite time in the past. Though contemporary versions of the cosmological argument most typically assume that there was a beginning to the cosmic chain of physical, or natural causes, the early formulations of the argument did not have the benefit of this degree of theoretical insight into the apparent origins of the cosmos.

Plato's demiurge and Aristotle's Prime Mover each referred to a being who, they speculated, set in motion an already existing "stuff" of the cosmos. A millennium and a half later, Aquinas went on to argue that there is an Uncaused Cause which is just another name for God. And to Aquinas, it remained logically possible that the universe has already existed for an infinite amount of time, and will continue to exist for an infinite amount of time. In his classic Summa Theologiae, he posited that even if the universe has always existed, (a notion which he rejected on other grounds), there is still the question of cause, or even of "first cause."

The argument from contingency

Aquinas follows Aristotle in claiming that there must be something which explains why the universe exists. Since the universe could, under different circumstances, conceivably not exist—that is to say, since it is contingent—its existence must have a cause. And that cause cannot simply be another contingent thing, it must be something which exists by necessity, that is, it must be something which must exist. In other words, even if the universe has always existed, it still owes that existence to Aristotle's Uncaused Cause.

So Aquinas arrives at his conclusion, that God exists, whether there was a first event in the universe or not. Since either the universe has always existed, or it had a first event, Aquinas says that this argument definitively proves the existence of God. Aquinas actually was using at least two arguments, an argument from contingency and an argument from first cause that was a combination of the two types introduced in the next section. It should be carefully noted that Aquinas' overlapping 13th Century argument(s) would not have held up to the scrutiny of a strict logical analysis in the 20th or 21st Century.

The German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz made a somewhat similar argument with his Principle of sufficient reason in 1714. He wrote: "There can be found no fact that is true or existent, or any true proposition, without there being a sufficient reason for its being so and not otherwise, although we cannot know these reasons in most cases." He formulated the cosmological argument succinctly: "Why is there something rather than nothing? The sufficient reason...is found in a substance which...is a necessary Being bearing the reason for its existence within itself."

"In esse" and "in fieri"

The difference between the arguments from causation in fieri and in esse is a fairly important one. In fieri is generally translated as "becoming," while in esse is generally translated as "in existence." In fieri, the process of becoming, is similar to building a house. Once it is built, the builder walks away and it stands of its own accord. (It may require occasional maintenance, but that is beyond the scope of the "first cause" argument.)

In esse (in existence) is more akin to the light from a candle or the liquid in a vessel. George Hayward Joyce, SJ, explains that "...where the light of the candle is dependent on the candle's continued existence, not only does a candle produce light in a room in the first instance, but its continued presence is necessary if the illumination is to continue. If it is removed, the light ceases. Again, a liquid receives its shape from the vessel in which it is contained; but were the pressure of the containing sides withdrawn, it would not retain its form for an instant." This form of the argument is far more difficult to separate from a purely "first-cause" argument than is the example of the house's maintenance above, because here the "first cause" is insufficient without the candle's or vessel's continued existence.

Thus, Aristotle's argument is in fieri, while Aquinas' argument is both in fieri and in esse (plus an additional argument from contingency). The distinction is an excellent example of the difference between a deistic view (Aristotle) and a theistic view (Aquinas). Leibnitz, who wrote more than two centuries before the "big bang" was taken as granted, is arguing in esse. As a general trend, the modern slants on the cosmological argument including the Kalam argument, tend to lean very strongly towards an in fieri argument.

Counterarguments and objections

Several objections to the cosmological argument have been raised. One very simple objection is that, in the formulation above, the conclusion (5) There must be a first cause (which itself does not have a cause) is explicitly forbidden by assumption (1) Everything has a cause. Therefore adherents of the First Cause argument must necessarily be able to conceive of something that does not have a cause. If God does not need a cause, then why, opponents ask, would the material universe? This objection is related to the question "If God created the universe, who created God?"

Another objection is that even if one accepts the argument as a proof of a First Cause, it does not identify this first cause with "God." The argument does not even attempt to ascribe this First Cause with attributes necessary to call it "God," not even with extremely basic prerequisites such as self-awareness and will (though there are some theists who actually do make such attempts when using this argument [1]). It simply names the First Cause as "God" without proving that it has the characteristics that that name implies. It is also troublesome to use the title "creator," as this would imply assuming that the "creator" has some sort of intelligence. At best, one may be able to call this first cause a "super natural" first cause; as this wouldn't make any more assumptions that have already been made. Furthermore, the argument only requires God as a first cause, but fails to prove that God continued to exist after serving that purpose. Some deists agree that the argument proves that God created the universe, but nevertheless maintain that God then ceased to exist, or ceased to interact with the material universe.

Opponents also point out that the cosmological argument applies temporal concepts to situations where time does not exist. For example, "cause" is a temporal concept - by definition, it requires time; things which exist outside of time do not have to be caused. (Indeed, this is the excuse given for God's assumed lack of a requirement to be caused.) However, time is merely a property of the universe, and so the laws of time (ie. cause) cannot be logically applied to the universe itself as a whole. Similarly, time can begin, but not require a cause, since all human concepts of a caused beginning have something before that beginning (including the cause); this is not true of time itself.

Defenders of cosmological arguments that do not assume the finite age of the universe insist that eternal existence, the "always there" assumption, does not eliminate the problem of origin. On a similar note, one could also claim that the universe has always existed and its "creation" is thus not causal in nature, so no "first cause" is necessary. If one believes that time is infinite, then indeed there is no need for a "first cause" and therefore no need for God. However, it is not yet certain whether science agrees or disagrees with this - some scientific models continue to suggest a eternal, cyclical, or oscillatory universe rather than a one-time event, for example. What can be said is that science is presently still learning the nature of time, and how the visible universe originated, therefore to an extent certain questions are partially unanswered.

Gottfried Leibniz stated the problem in his conclusion, although his terminology included some assumptions. If his principle of sufficient reason is indeed universally applicable, then the First Thing must either (1) be its own cause or (2) have a non-causal explanation. The non-causal explanation would either (a) make the First Thing's existence be in some way self-explanatory or (b) make it follow in an explanatory way from self-explanatory truths, such as the truths of logic.

All three options have had defenders. Thus, option (1), the causa sui option, is defended by Descartes. Option (2a) is held by some of those like Aquinas who think that God's essence is identical with God's existence, or by those who hold, more weakly, that God's existence follows from his essence. Option (2b) essentially holds that there is a sound ontological argument for the existence of God, albeit we may not have discovered it yet. It follows from the principle of sufficient reason that one of the three options holds, but a defender of the Principle does not need to give an independent proof of any one of these options. It is, after all, the conclusion of the argument that one of these holds. In fact, this conclusion might be the starting point for responding to the problem of identifying the First Thing with God—that is how it is in Aquinas, for instance. Thus, if one could show the premises of the cosmological argument to be true and show that options (1) and (2a) were not tenable, then the cosmological argument would turn into an argument for the existence of an ontological argument. We would then know that there is a sound ontological argument, even if we did not know what it is.

Alternately, the defender of the cosmological argument can restrict the principle of sufficient reason in such a way that it does not require us to give an explanation of the existence of the First Thing. One such restriction would be to restrict the Principle only to require the explanation of contingent facts. Another is to restrict the Principle only to require the explanation of explainable facts. These restrictions would require arguments, respectively, that the universe is contingent or that the universe's existence is explicable.

If the principle of sufficient reason does not hold, then the "selection" among potential alternatives must be random or a "brute fact". Defenders of the Principle will insist that neither option really makes sense.

Criticisms of counterarguments

To evaluate arguments/objections, it is necessary to consider the following:

1. The cosmological argument as held by Aristotle, Aquinas, Maimonides and Averroes does not concern itself with a "first cause" that starts at the beginning of time.

2. The cosmological argument is posited on the assumption that everything in the experience of our five physical senses is natural and that everything natural is caused, contingent and dependent - subject to cause by the uncaused cause.

That includes time. Time is understood as "natural" in substance, while the uncaused cause is not natural and therefore not operable in time. i.e.: Aristotle, who first formulated the argument, believed the natural, caused universe was infinite, without beginning. Aquinas, who re-formulated the argument as a proof for monotheism, understood the Divine as outside of time, viewing all of time, indeed being present in all of time, simultaneously like a vast simulcrum

3. Criticisms of this argument should be divided into those that criticize the essence of the dualistic argument: that the universe has a cause that is different in substance from the natural universe, versus those that criticize the monotheistic extension of the argument that the cause of the universe is God (as asserted by Maimonides, Aquinas and Averroes).

The Aristotlean formulation of the argument held that the universe is of an essence or substance such that all things in the universe are caused: dependent and contingent. He postulated an alternative essence or substance that does not have the qualities of dependency or contingency and which, therefore, does not require a cause, but which itself may be the source upon which our natural, caused universe, is dependent, or contingent.

Laying aside that Aristotle believed the universe to be infinite in nature, stated in its original formulation as such, this is not saying a very different thing from modern, naturalistic cosmology. When we look for the origin of the universe we effectively postulate "substances", forces or circumstances that are "pre-natural". Consider some of the varieties of physical, cosmological expanations for the origin of the universe: (a) understanding that time itself is part of the natural order, we cannot say "before" time, but we say that at the instant of the big bang, conditions that cannot exist under natural physical laws caused an inflationary expansion of matter and energy or (b) "branes", moving through imperceptible dimensions stretch in opposing directions until they turn back on themselves, eventually colliding and causing new universes to come into being.

In either case, though the "cause" is not supernatural as the monotheistic form of the cosmological argument suggests, it is, nonetheless, "specialized" and yields to a form of naturalistic dualism. Monotheistic innovations of the argument distinguish themselves by postulating that the dualism is supernatural and that whatever the "uncaused cause", it is the Divine.

Almost all physical cosmologists subscribe to a theory of universal origin that is effectively dualistic in nature and basically reflective of the Aristotlean reasoning underlying the original cosmological argument - they simply do so without making the jump to assume any spiritually supernatural qualities of a universe's dual source. This is not special pleading as some have said, as special pleading applies to the same claiming to be different, not to the different, in fact, being different. On careful consideration of the big bang, for example, some sort of dualistic "cause", itself presumably not caused, or at least not caused by "natural" forces of our universe, appears prima facie to be inescapable.

Understood as such, where the inherent dualism of the cosmological argument forces neither a naturalist (uncaused cause was not Divine) or supernaturalist (uncaused cause was Divine) conclusion, it is possible to formulate versions of the cosmological argument that lend to an atheistic conclusion.

Scientific positions

Modern quantum physics is sometimes interpreted to deny the validity of the first premise of this argument (that everything has a cause), showing that subatomic particles such as electrons, positrons, and photons, can come into existence, and perish, by virtue of spontaneous energy fluctuations in a vacuum. Though such occurrences do not violate the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy, Bell's theorem shows that these are impossible to predict.

Modern cosmology is sometimes taken to be neutral on the second premise, asserting that while spacetime as observed tends toward a singularity giving the universe an observed finite age, this does not discount the possibility that the stochastic processes that govern the early evolution of the universe actually cause the universe to be eternal. In particular, the lack of a consistent theory of quantum gravity has meant that there is no physical theory and no meaningful prediction can be made about what character the universe had before the Planck time. Indeed the supposed singularity from which the universe is said to have originated in the classic Big Bang picture is actually a physical paradox - an indication that current theory is not an adequate description. This era of the universe and its associated energy regime remains one of the unsolved problems in physics and as such does not lend itself either to the existence of a "first cause" or lack thereof.

Recently, newer, speculative theories have been offered by a number of theorists, but there is no scientific consensus as of yet on whether the universe necessarily began to exist or whether it is eternal (for example, "big bang," expansion of cosmos, then contraction, then "big crunch," then a "big bang" again, once every 30 or 40 billion years ad infinitum).

A commonly stated workaround for the cosmological argument is the nature of time. The Big Bang is said to be the start of both space and time, so the question "What was there before the universe?" makes no sense; the concept of "before" becomes meaningless when considering a situation without time. This has been put forward by Stephen Hawking, who said that asking what occurred before the Big Bang is like asking what is north of the North Pole (however, this comment was made in reference to cosmology and not theology).

Teleological Argument

A teleological argument (or a design argument) is an argument for the existence of God or a creator based on perceived evidence of order, purpose, design and/or direction in nature. The word "teleological" is derived from the Greek word telos, meaning end or purpose. Teleology is the supposition that there is purpose or directive principle in the works and processes of nature.

The argument

Although there are variations, the basic argument can be stated as follows:

1. X is too (complex, orderly, adaptive, apparently purposeful, and/or beautiful) to have occurred randomly or accidentally.
2. Therefore, X must have been created by a (sentient, intelligent, wise, and/or purposeful) being.
3. God is that (sentient, intelligent, wise, and/or purposeful) being.
4. Therefore, God exists.

Alternatively, for 2, 3, and 4, more than one (sentient, intelligent, wise, and/or purposeful) being must have created X; therefore more than one creator, (ie. gods and goddesses) exist. see: Polytheism.

X usually stands for the universe; the evolution process; humankind; a given animal species; or a particular organ like the eye or capability like language in humans. X may also stand for the fundamental constants of the universe like physical constants and physical law. Sometimes this argument is also based on the anthropic principle that these constants seem tuned specifically to allow intelligent life to evolve.

Some versions of the argument may substitute for God a lesser demiurge, multiple Gods or Gods and Goddesses, or perhaps extraterrestrials as cause for natural phenomena, although reapplication of the argument might still imply an ultimate cause. However, most of the classic forms of this argument are linked to monotheism. And, some forms of teleological argument choose to leave the question of the attributes of a hypothesized "Designer" completely open. A very concise and whimsical teleological argument, for instance, was offered by G.K. Chesterton in 1908: "So one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot."

History of the argument

Plato (c. 427–c. 347 B.C.E.) posited a "demiurge" of supreme wisdom and intelligence as the creator of the cosmos in his work Timaeus. For Plato, the demiurge lacked the supernatural ability to create "ex nihilo" or out of nothing. The demiurge was able only to organize the "anake." The anake was the only other co-existent element or presence in Plato's cosmogony. Plato's teleological perspective is also built upon the analysis of a priori order and structure in the world which he had already presented in The Republic.

Aristotle (c. 384–322 B.C.E.) also developed the idea of a creator of the cosmos, often referred to as the "Prime Mover" in his work Metaphysics. Aristotle's views have very strong aspects of a teleological argument, specifically that of a prime mover who, so to speak, looks ahead in setting the cosmos into motion. Indeed, Aristotle argued that all nature reflects inherent purposiveness and direction.

Cicero (c. 106–c. 43 B.C.E.) also made one of the earliest known teleological arguments. In de Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods) Cicero stated, "The divine power is to be found in a principle of reason which pervades the whole of nature". He was writing from the cultural background of the Roman religion. In Roman mythology the creator goddess, Gaia was borrowed from Greek mythology. The Romans called her Tellus or Terra.

"When you see a sundial or a water-clock, you see that it tells the time by design and not by chance. How then can you imagine that the universe as a whole is devoid of purpose and intelligence, when it embraces everything, including these artifacts themselves and their artificers?" (Cicero, De Natura Deorum, ii. 34)

Augustine of Hippo (354–430 C.E.) presented a classic teleological perspective in his work, City of God. He describes the "city of man" and essentially posits that God's plan is to replace the city of man with the city of God (at some as-yet-unknown point in the future). Whether this is to happen gradually or suddenly is not made clear in Augustine's work. He did not, however, make a formal argument for the existence of God; rather, God's existence is already presumed and Augustine is giving a proposed view of God's teleology. Augustine's perspective follows from and is built upon the neo-Platonic views of his era, which in turn have their original roots in Plato's cosmogony.

Aquinas and the scholastics

The most notable scholastics (circa 1100-1500 C.E.) who put forth teleological arguments were Averroes (Ibn-Rushd) and Thomas Aquinas. Averroes was writing in Spain from an Islamic perspective in the latter half of the 12th Century, and his influence was very considerable in interpreting many of Aristotle's ideas for the first time in Latin, thereby directly helping to make Aristotle available to Aquinas. Averroes was a transitional philosopher, partly a priori neo-Platonic, and partly a posteriori Aristotlean. As a result of his overlapping of the two modes in interpreting Aristotle, and also as a result of what would be known today as a strong disagreement between a deistic and theistic viewpoint in religious circles of that era, Averroes' work was highly controversial and fairly quickly became officially banned in both the Christian and Islamic world. Despite the lingering Platonic influence, Averroes' teleological arguments can be characterized as primarily Aristotlean and presuming one God. He argues based mainly upon Aristotle's Physics, in essence that the combination of order and continual motion in the universe cannot be accidental, and requires a Prime Mover, a Supreme Principle, which is in itself pure Intelligence.

This would set the stage for Aquinas in the 13th Century, who was much more thoroughly Aristotlean, a posteriori and empirically based than his predecessors. Aquinas makes a specific, compact and famous version of the teleological argument, the fifth of his five proofs for the existence of God in his Summa Theologiae:

"The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack knowledge, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that they achieve their end, not fortuitously, but designedly. Now whatever lacks knowledge cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is directed by the archer. Therefore, some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God." [2]

The British empiricists

The empiricist philosopher John Locke, writing in the late 17th century, proposed a new and very influential view wherein the only knowledge humans can have is a posteriori (i.e., based upon sense experience) and that there can be no a priori knowledge whatsoever. In the early 18th century, the Catholic Bishop George Berkeley determined that Locke's view immediately opened a door that would lead to eventual atheism. In response to Locke, he put forth a form of "radical empiricism" in which things only exist as a result of their being perceived (and God fills in for humans by doing the perceiving whenever humans are not around to do it). As part of this approach Berkeley included in his text Alciphron a variant of the teleological argument which held that the order we see in nature is the language or handwriting of God.

David Hume, in the mid-18th Century, presented arguments both for and against the teleological argument in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. The character Philo, summarizing the teleological argument, uses the example of a watch. Philo is not satisfied with the teleological argument, however. He attempts a number of interesting refutations, including one that arguably foreshadows Darwin's theory. In the end, however, Philo agrees that the teleological argument is valid. Daniel Dennett maintains that, although Hume was ultimately dissatisfied with the teleological argument, his cultural context prevented him from taking any of the alternatives seriously.

The watchmaker analogy

The Watchmaker analogy framing the argument with reference to a timepiece dates back to Cicero, whose illustration was quoted above. It was also used by, among others, Robert Hooke and Voltaire, the latter of which remarked: "If a watch proves the existence of a watchmaker but the universe does not prove the existence of a great Architect, then I consent to be called a fool." Today the analogy is usually associated with the theologian William Paley, who presented the argument in his book Natural Theology published in 1802. As a theology student Charles Darwin found Paley's arguments compelling, then later developed his theory of the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection which puts forward an alternative explanation for complexity in nature.

Many others have countered the watch argument, such as by showing that highly complex systems can be produced by a series of very small randomly-generated steps. Richard Dawkins' book The Blind Watchmaker (1986) is one of the best-known examples of this approach outside philosophy and theology.

More recently, proponents of intelligent design have reframed the argument as the concept of irreducible complexity, the premise that certain biological structures can function only if all their substructures are present. This argument asserts that each substructure confers no benefit on its own, and therefore cannot have been selected by an evolutionary mechanism. The argument then posits that the probability of all the substructures being created in a single mutation is too low to be considered possible. Critics describe this as an argument from ignorance which assumes that substructures have not changed in function, and give illustrations of how gradual replacement by a series of advantageous variations can lead to the evolution of structures claimed as being irreducibly complex.

The anthropic principle and fine-tuned universe arguments

A modern variation of the teleological argument is built upon the anthropic principle. The anthropic principle is derived from the apparent delicate balance of conditions necessary for human life. In this line of reasoning, speculation about the vast, perhaps infinite, range of possible conditions in which life could not exist is compared to the speculated improbability of achieving conditions in which life does exist, and then interpreted as indicating a fine-tuned universe specifically designed so human life is possible. This view is well articulated by John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986).

Some of the estimated proportions involved in cosmic "fine-tuning" are remarkable. John Polkinghorne, for instance, pointed out in 1985 that just one factor among many in the cosmos, the difference between expansive and contractive forces in the expanding cosmos according to then-currently accepted theory, depends upon an extremely fine balance of the total energy involved to within one in 10⁶⁰ , a sixty-one digit number equivalent to taking aim from Earth and hitting an inch-wide target at the farthest reaches of the observable universe. George Wald, also in 1985, wrote in the same context that the conditions for something as fundamental as the atom depend on a balance of forces to within one in 10¹⁸. Proponents of the fine-tuned universe form of teleological argument typically argue that taken together, the various fine-tuned balances appear quite improbable, and hint strongly at something designed rather than accidental. And, of course, "designed" implies a "designer" of some kind.

Many highly regarded scientists, mathematicians, philosophers and a few theologians have weighed in on both sides in an interesting debate. A counter-argument to the anthropic principle is that one could manipulate statistics to define any number of natural situations that are extremely improbable, but that have happened nevertheless. By the critics' view a key problem in terms of being able to verify whether the hypothesized probabilities are correct, is that the improbable conditions were identified after the event, so they cannot be checked by experiment. And very importantly, there is no ability to sample a large enough set of alternatives (indeed we know of no other cosmos to sample) in order to be able to properly attach any odds or probabilities to these natural situations in the cosmos. Moreover, observations of the cosmos to date indicate that the conditions on Earth are but one of widely varying conditions on many, many planets in many, many solar systems, all of which to date do not appear to have met the conditions necessary for life. An analogy from common experience where the odds can be readily calculated is given by John Allen Paulos in Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences (1989), that the probability of a very mundane event such as that of getting any particular hand of thirteen cards in a game of bridge is approximately one in 600 billion. It would be absurd to examine the hand carefully, calculate the odds, and then assert that it must not have been randomly dealt. This perspective on the issue of improbability appears to bolster the position that characteristics of Earth that allow it to sustain life could be just a fortunate and/or accidental "hit", so to speak.

In the wake of the "fine-tuned universe" observations and arguments published in the 1980s, the intelligent design movement picked up some of the above concepts, added some additional ones such as irreducible complexity (a variant of the watchmaker analogy) and specified complexity (closely resembling a fine-tuning argument) and attempted to cast the resulting combined form of the teleological argument as scientific rather than speculative. The vast majority of scientists have disagreed with the assertion that it is scientific, as have the findings of a federal court in the United States in a 2005 decision, which ruled that the "intelligent design" arguments are essentially religious in nature.

Formal objections and counterarguments

Complexity does not imply design

The first (and therefore second) premise assumes that one can infer the existence of intelligent design merely by examining an object. The teleological argument assumes that because life is complex, it must have been designed. It is argued that this is non-sequitur logic. Life or objects are described as "orderly" or "ordered", which implies that an intelligent designer has ordered them. However, in reality, there are examples of systems which are non-random or ordered simply because it is following natural physical processes, for example diamonds or snowflakes.

The design claim is often attacked as an argument from ignorance, since it is often unexplained or unsupported, or explained by unscientific conjecture, such as irreducible complexity. Supporters of intelligent design assume that natural objects and man-made objects have similar properties, therefore both must be designed. However, different objects can have similar properties for different reasons, such as stars and light bulbs. Proponents must therefore demonstrate that only intelligent design can cause orderly systems or the argument is invalid.

A designed organism would, on the face of it, be in contradiction to evolutionary theory. As most professional biologists support the theory of biological evolution by means of natural selection, they reject the first premise, arguing that evolution is not only an alternative explanation for the complexity of life but a better explanation with more supporting evidence. Living organisms obey the same physical laws as inanimate objects. A range of chemical reactions could take place, forming other chemicals with complex properties and ways of interacting. Over very long periods of time self-replicating structures could arise and later form DNA. Thus biologists commonly view the design argument as an unimpressive argument for the existence of a god.

Advocates of design have responded to this objection by pointing out that information theory demonstrates that DNA is a "code," and is therefore not analogous structurally to a snowflake or crystal as the written pages of a book or this article would not be. They also claim that no natural process has ever created a code, and that explanations put forward of the origins of DNA or gradual change are often couched in vague terms such as, for example simply "arising" or "forming" without offering any explanation as to how the thing arose or formed, and that this is unscientific.^{[citation needed]} This argument, however, takes liberties with the definition of "code" and as such, is often considered to be an example of the logical error of equivocation. It may also be the error of reification; i.e., of treating a linguistic metaphor or analogy such as "code" as a real object or state.

Contradictory premises lead to an infinite regress

Some argue that even if the first and second premises are accepted, the implied designer (Y) might be an unknown force or mere demiurge, not God as God is commonly understood. It is argued in defence that the outside force through which Y came into being might then be explained as a more powerful being resulting in either an omnipotent being or infinite regression.

Critics often argue that the teleological argument would apply to the designer, arguing any designer must be at least as complex and purposeful as the designed object. This, they say, would create the absurdity of an infinite series of designers. However, the counter-argument of an "undesigned designer," akin to Aristotle's uncaused causer, is common. This argument, however, is incomplete as it does not indicate why the designer can be undesigned but the universe cannot.

Does not prove the existence of God

Even if the argument from design proves the existence of a powerful intelligent designer, it does not prove that the designer is God. Voltaire observed "[F]rom this one argument, I cannot conclude anything more, except that it is probable that an intelligent and superior being has prepared and shaped matter with dexterity; I cannot conclude from this argument alone that this being has made the matter out of nothing or that he is infinite in any sense [i.e. that he is God]."

It has also been pointed out that the argument relies on a cultural context of monotheism when it claims to prove the existence of a single, supreme creator Being. In the context of a polytheistic culture, however, the argument could just as easily be used to argue for the existence of gods (in the plural) — a group of intelligent supernatural designers. In David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, the character Philo argued, amidst other counterarguments to the teleological argument, that there "could have been a committee of deities."

Incoherence

George H. Smith, in his book Atheism: The Case Against God, points out what he considers to be a fatal flaw in the argument from design

Consider the idea that nature itself is the product of design. How could this be demonstrated? Nature, as we have seen, provides the basis of comparison by which we distinguish between designed objects and natural objects. We are able to infer the presence of design only to the extent that the characteristics of an object differ from natural characteristics. Therefore, to claim that nature as a whole was designed is to destroy the basis by which we differentiate between artifacts and natural objects. Evidences of design are those characteristics not found in nature, so it is impossible to produce evidence of design within the context of nature itself. Only if we first step beyond nature, and establish the existence of a supernatural designer, can we conclude that nature is the result of conscious planning. (p. 268)

Other issues

Recently, the teleological argument has become the subject of controversy because of its close relationship to the Intelligent Design movement, which uses a variant of the teleological argument while claiming scientific credibility. The controversy is closely related to the perennial debate between proponents of theistic and "deistic" conceptions of God.

For example, it is argued that supernatural events cannot be falsified. There is no empirical (and therefore scientific) way to test for creation per se. To illustrate this, Robert Todd Carroll said "the universe would look the same to us whether it was designed or not." This type of argument can be taken as a counterargument to the Intelligent Design version of the teleological argument. Further in this context, natural scientists would say with virtual unanimity that to invoke supernatural explanations does not add to our understanding of the world. Since "supernatural" events are by definition above nature (super-natural), they cannot be considered a scientific alternative to any theory of natural science. (see also: God of the Gaps, Faith and rationality.)

A common question arises which intends on making our theories on the origin of life a matter of subjectivity: "Which is more believable?" or "Which one requires more faith?" Both sides would probably admit that whatever is more believable is not necessarily true, however, if faith is taken to mean a belief that transcends evidence against that belief, belief in evolution is not a matter of faith due to the considerable evidence in its favour. "Which is more believable?" might be considered an irrelevant question as belief is subjective - what is believable for one is unbelievable to another. The question might be rephrased: "if one objectively studies the arguments in favour of intelligent design, and one does the same for the scientific theory of evolution, which one of these theories is more useful and logical an explanation, and better supported by evidence, and therefore 'most believable'?" (see also: Pascal's wager)

Some have argued that, although from some religious perspectives intelligent design is often contrasted with evolution, there is no inherent contradiction between the two. Certain religious perspectives may find nothing illogical about believing in a creator-deity who purposed evolution to propagate the emergence of life on earth. This position is becoming increasingly accepted today— indeed, to illustrate, Pope John Paul II put forward a position of exactly this kind.

External links

• Teleological Arguments for God's Existence from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Dictionary of the history of Ideas: Design argument
• William Paley: Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity , London: 12th edition, 1809. Online in full.
• Design arguments for the existence of God from the Internet encyclopedia of philosophy.
• William Lane Craig: The Teleological Argument and the Anthropic Principle
• The Skeptic's Dictionary on argument from design

References and further reading

• Daniel Dennett (1995). Darwin's Dangerous Idea.
• Richard Dawkins (1986) The Blind Watchmaker (takes a view against the teleological argument).
• Derek Gjersen (1989). Science and Philosophy: Past and Present. London: Penguin.
• Eric Sotnak, "Analysis of the Teleological Argument"
• Will Crouch, "Hume and Philo on the Teleological Argument"

• The Pantheistic argument defines God as All; it is similar to monism and panentheism.
• The argument from the mind-body problem postulates that it is impossible to grasp the relation of consciousness to materiality without introducing a divinity. See Malebranche.

Empirical arguments (for)

Other arguments avail themselves of data beyond definitions and axioms. For example, some of these arguments require only that one assume that a non-random universe able to support life exists. These arguments include:

• The Teleological argument, which argues that the universe's order and complexity shows signs of purpose (telos), and that it must have been designed by an intelligent designer with properties that only a god could have.
• The Anthropic argument focuses on basic facts, such as our existence, to prove God.
• The Moral argument argues that objective morality exists and that therefore God exists.
• The Transcendental argument for the existence of God, which argues that logic, science, ethics, and other things we take seriously do not make sense if there is no God. Therefore, atheist arguments must ultimately refute themselves if pressed with rigorous consistency. By contrast, there is also a Transcendental Argument for the Non-existence of God.
• The Will to Believe Doctrine was pragmatist philosopher William James' attempt to prove God by showing that the adoption of theism as a hypothesis "works" in a believer's life. This doctrine depended heavily on James' pragmatic theory of truth where beliefs are proven by how they work when adopted rather than by proofs before they are believed (a form of the hypothetico-deductive method).

Inductive arguments (for)

Inductive arguments argue their conclusions through inductive reasoning.

• Another class of philosophers asserts that the proofs for the existence of God present a fairly large probability though not absolute certainty. A number of obscure points, they say, always remain. In order to overcome these difficulties there is necessary either an act of the will, a religious experience, or the discernment of the misery of the world without God, so that finally the heart makes the decision. This view is maintained, among others, by the English statesman Arthur Balfour in his book The Foundations of Belief (1895). The opinions set forth in this work were adopted in France by Ferdinand Brunetière, the editor of the Revue des deux Mondes. Many orthodox Protestants express themselves in the same manner, as, for instance, Dr. E. Dennert, President of the Kepler Society, in his work Ist Gott tot?.

Subjective arguments (for)

Subjective arguments mainly rely on the testimony or experience of certain witnesses, or the propositions of a specific revealed religion.

• The witness argument gives credibility to personal witnesses, contemporary and throughout the ages. A variation of this is the argument from miracles which relies on testimony of supernatural events to establish the existence of God.
• The religious or Christological argument is specific to religions such as Christianity, and asserts that for example Jesus' life as written in the New Testament establishes his credibility, so we can believe in the truth of his statements about God. An example of this argument is the Trilemma presented by C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity.
• The Majority argument argues that people in all times and in different places have believed in God, so it is unlikely that he does not exist.

Arguments grounded in personal experience

• The Scotch School led by Thomas Reid taught that the fact of the existence of God is accepted by us without knowledge of reasons but simply by a natural impulse. That God exists, this school said, is one of the chief metaphysical principles that we accept not because they are evident in themselves or because they can be proved, but because common sense obliges us to accept them.
• The Argument from a Proper Basis argues that belief in God is "properly basic"—that is, similar to statements such as "I see a chair" or "I feel pain." Such beliefs are non-falsifiable and, thus, neither able to be proved nor disproved; they concern perceptual beliefs or indisputable mental states.
• In Germany, the School of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi taught that our reason is able to perceive the suprasensible. Jacobi distinguished three faculties: sense, reason, and understanding. Just as sense has immediate perception of the material so has reason immediate perception of the immaterial, while the understanding brings these perceptions to our consciousness and unites them to one another. God's existence, then, cannot be proved—Jacobi, like Kant, rejected the absolute value of the principle of causality—it must be felt by the mind.
• In his Emile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau asserted that when our understanding ponders over the existence of God it encounters nothing but contradictions; the impulses of our hearts, however, are of more value than the understanding, and these proclaim clearly to us the truths of natural religion, namely, the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.
• The same theory was advocated in Germany by Friedrich Schleiermacher (died 1834), who assumed an inner religious sense by means of which we feel religious truths. According to Schleiermacher, religion consists solely in this inner perception, and dogmatic doctrines are inessential.
• Many modern Protestant theologians follow in Schleiermacher's footsteps, and teach that the existence of God cannot be demonstrated; certainty as to this truth is only furnished us by inner experience, feeling, and perception.
• Modernist Christianity also denies the demonstrability of the existence of God. According to them we can only know something of God by means of the vital immanence, that is, under favorable circumstances the need of the Divine dormant in our subconsciousness becomes conscious and arouses that religious feeling or experience in which God reveals himself to us. In condemnation of this view the oath against Modernism formulated by Pius X says: "Deum ... naturali rationis lumine per ea quae facta sunt, hoc est per visibilia creationis opera, tanquam causam per effectus certo cognosci adeoque demostrari etiam posse, profiteor." ("I declare that by the natural light of reason, God can be certainly known and therefore His existence demonstrated through the things that are made, i.e., through the visible works of Creation, as the cause is known through its effects.")

Arguments against the existence of God

Each of the following arguments aims at showing that some particular conception of a god either is inherently meaningless, contradictory, or contradicts known scientific and/or historical facts, and that therefore a god thus described does not exist.

Empirical arguments (against)

Empirical arguments depend on empirical data in order to prove their conclusions.

• "Within the framework of scientific rationalism one arrives at the belief in the nonexistence of God, not because of certain knowledge, but because of a sliding scale of methods. At one extreme, we can confidently rebut the personal Gods of creationists on firm empirical grounds: science is sufficient to conclude beyond reasonable doubt that there never was a worldwide flood and that the evolutionary sequence of the Cosmos does not follow either of the two versions of Genesis. The more we move toward a deistic and fuzzily defined God, however, the more scientific rationalism reaches into its toolbox and shifts from empirical science to logical philosophy informed by science. Ultimately, the most convincing arguments against a deistic God are Hume's dictum and Occam's razor. These are philosophical arguments, but they also constitute the bedrock of all of science, and cannot therefore be dismissed as non-scientific. The reason we put our trust in these two principles is because their application in the empirical sciences has led to such spectacular successes throughout the last three centuries."

• The argument from inconsistent revelations contests the existence of the Middle Eastern, Biblical deity called God as described in holy scriptures, such as the Jewish Tanakh, the Christian Bible, or the Muslim Qur'an, by identifying contradictions between different scriptures, contradictions within a single scripture, or contradictions between scripture and known facts.

• The problem of evil in general, and the logical and evidential arguments from evil in particular contest the existence of a god who is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent by arguing that such a god would not permit the existence of perceivable evil or suffering, which can easily be shown to exist. Already Epicure pointed out the contradiction, stating that if an omnipotent God existed, the evil in the world should be impossible. As there is evil in the world, the god must either not be omnipotent or he must not be omnibenevolent. If he is not omnipotent, he is not God; if he is not omnibenevolent, he is not God the Allmercyful, but an evil creature. Similar arguments have been performed by Schopenhauer.

• The argument from poor design contests the idea that a god created life, on the basis that lifeforms exhibit poor or malevolent design, which can be easily explained using evolution and naturalism.

• The argument from nonbelief contests the existence of an omnipotent god who wants humans to believe in him by arguing that such a god would do a better job of gathering believers. This argument is contested by the claim that God wants to test humans to see who has the most faith. However, this assertion is dismissed by the argument surrounding the problem of evil.

Deductive arguments (against)

Deductive arguments attempt to prove their conclusions by deductive reasoning from true premises.

• The omnipotence paradox is one of many arguments which argue that the definitions or descriptions of a god are logically contradictory, demonstrating his non-existence. This paradox can be shown through questions such as: "Can God create a rock so big that He Himself could not lift it?" Some may argue that this paradox is resolved by the argument that such a rock is an impossibility of our reality rather than the result of an imperfect God.

• One simple argument that the existence of a god is self-contradictory goes as follows: If God is defined as omniscient and omnipotent, then God has absolute knowledge of all events that will occur in the future, including all of his future actions, due to his omniscience. However, his omnipotence implies he has the power to act in a different manner than he predicted, thus implying that God's predictions about the future are fallible. This implies that God is not really omniscient, at least when it comes to knowledge about future events. So a God defined as omniscient and omnipotent cannot exist. Theists may counter that God exists out of time and the premises for this argument are wrong. Few accept the aforementioned argument of omnipotence, and therefore the argument is based on a very weak assumption.

• The argument from free will contests the existence of an omniscient god who has free will by arguing that the two properties are contradictory. If god has already planned the future, then humanity is destined to follow that plan and we do not have true free will to deviate from it. Therefore our freewill contradicts an omniscient god.

• The Transcendental Argument for the Non-existence of God contests the existence of an intelligent creator by demonstrating that such a being would make logic and morality contingent, which is incompatible with the presuppositionalist assertion that they are necessary, and contradicts the efficacy of science. A more general line of argument based on TANG, , seeks to generalize this argument to all necessary features of the universe and all god-concepts.

• The counter-argument against the Cosmological argument ("chicken or the egg") states that if the Universe had to be created by God because it must have a creator, then God, in turn would have had to be created by some other God, and so on. This attacks the premise that the Universe is the second cause, (after God, who is claimed to be the first cause). A common response to this is that God exists outside of time and hence needs no cause. However, such arguments can also be applied to the universe itself - that since time began when the universe did, it is non-sensical to talk about a state "before" the universe which could have caused it, since cause requires time.

• Theological noncognitivism, as used in literature, usually seeks to disprove the god-concept by showing that it is unverifiable and meaningless.

• It is alleged that there is a logical impossibility in theism: God is defined as an extra-temporal being, but also as an active creator. The argument suggests that the very act of creation is inconceivable and absurd beyond the restraints of time.

Inductive arguments (against)

Inductive arguments argue their conclusions through inductive reasoning.

• The atheist-existentialist argument for the non-existence of a perfect sentient being states that since existence precedes essence, it follows from the meaning of the term sentient that a sentient being cannot be complete or perfect. It is touched upon by Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness. Sartre's phrasing is that God would be a pour-soi [a being-for-itself; a consciousness] who is also an en-soi [a being-in-itself; a thing]: which is a contradiction in terms. The argument is echoed thus in Salman Rushdie's novel Grimus: "That which is complete is also dead."

• The "no reason" argument tries to show that an omnipotent or perfect being would not have any reason to act in any way, specifically creating the universe, because it would have no desires since the very concept of desire is subjectively human. As the universe exists, there is a contradiction, and therefore, an omnipotent god cannot exist. This argument is espoused by Scott Adams in the book God's Debris.

• God is perfect. God also created man in his image. Man is imperfect, however. Therefore, God is imperfect and thus disproves himself.

Conclusions

Conclusions on the existence of God can be roughly divided into three camps: theist, atheist and agnostic. The theist and atheist camps can be further divided into two groups each, based on the belief of whether or not their position has been conclusively proven by the arguments.

Theism

The theistic conclusion is that the arguments indicate there are sufficient reasons to believe in the existence of God or gods.

God exists and this can be proven

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, following the Thomist tradition and the dogmatic definition of the First Vatican Council, affirms that it is a doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church that God's existence has been rationally demonstrated. Some other Christians in different denominations hold similar views. On this view, a distinction is to be drawn between:

1. doctrines that belong essentially to faith and cannot be proved, such as the doctrine of the Trinity or the Incarnation, and
2. doctrines that can be accepted by faith but can also be known by reason; that is, truths revealed by special revelation and by general revelation.

The existence of God is said to be one of the latter. As a theological defense of this view, one might cite Paul's claim that pagans were without excuse because "since the creation of the world [God's] invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made".

Another apologetical school of thought, a sort of synthesis of various existing Dutch and American Reformed thinkers (such as, Abraham Kuyper, Benjamin Warfield, Herman Dooyeweerd), emerged in the late 1920's. This school was instituted by Cornelius Van Til, and came to be popularly called Presuppositional apologetics (though Van Til himself felt "Transcendental" would be a more accurate title). The main distinction between this approach and the more classical evidentialist approach mentioned above is that the Presuppositionalist denies any common ground between the believer and the non-believer, except that which the non-believer denies, namely, the assumption of the truth of the theistic worldview. In other words, Presuppositionalists don't believe that the existence of God can be proven by appeal to raw, uninterpreted (or, "brute") facts, which have the same (theoretical) meaning to people with fundamentally different worldviews, because they deny that such a condition is even possible. They claim that the only possible proof for the existence of God is that the very same belief is the necessary condition to the intelligibility of all other human experience and action. In other words, they attempt to prove the existence of God by means of appeal to the alleged transcendental necessity of the belief — indirectly (by appeal to the allegedly unavowed presuppositions of the non-believer's worldview) rather than directly (by appeal to some form of common factuality). In practice this school utilizes what have come to be known as Transcendental Arguments for the Existence of God. In these arguments they claim to demonstrate that all human experience and action (even the condition of unbelief, itself) is a proof for the existence of God, because God's existence is the necessary condition of their intelligibility.

God exists, but this cannot be proven or disproven

Others have suggested that the several logical and philosophical arguments for the existence of God miss the point. The word God has a meaning in human culture and history that does not correspond to the beings whose necessity is proven by such arguments, assuming they are valid proofs. The real question is not whether a "most perfect being" or an "uncaused first cause" exist; the real question is whether Yahweh or Vishnu or Zeus, or some other deity of attested human religion, exists, and if so which deity. The proofs do not resolve that issue. Blaise Pascal suggested this objection in his Pensées when he wrote "The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — not the god of the philosophers!", see also Pascal's wager.

Some Christians note that the Christian faith teaches salvation is by faith, and that faith is reliance upon the faithfulness of God, which has little to do with the believer's ability to comprehend that in which he trusts. In other words, if Christian theology is true, then God's existence can never be demonstrated, either by empirical means or by philosophical argument. The most extreme example of this position is called fideism, which holds that faith is simply the will to believe, and argues that if God's existence were rationally demonstrable, faith in His existence would become superfluous. In The Justification of Knowledge, the Calvinist theologian Robert L. Reymond argues that believers should not attempt to prove the existence of God. Since he believes all such proofs are fundamentally unsound, believers should not place their confidence in them, much less resort to them in discussions with non-believers; rather, they should accept the content of revelation by faith. Reymond's position is similar to that of his mentor, Gordon Clark, which holds that all worldviews are based on certain unprovable first premises (or, axioms), and therefore are ultimately unprovable. The Christian theist therefore must simply choose to start with Christianity rather than anything else, by an unreasoned "leap of faith". This position is also sometimes called Presuppositional apologetics, but should not be confused with the Van Tillian variety discussed above.

An intermediate position is that of Alvin Plantinga who holds that a specific form of modal logic and an appeal to world-indexed properties render belief in the existence of God rational and justified, even though the existence of God cannot be demonstrated. Plantinga equates knowledge of God's existence with kinds of knowledge that are rational but do not proceed through demonstration, such as sensory knowledge.

Atheism

The atheistic conclusion is that the arguments indicate there are not sufficient reasons to believe in a God or gods either because they don't exist or other reasons such as the words don't refer to anything, or the concept makes no sense or it is unknowable.

Strong atheism

The conclusion called strong atheism (or explicit atheism) is the conclusion that God or gods do not exist. The strong atheist positively asserts this explicit non-existence, and may go further and claim that the existence of some or all gods is logically impossible. For example, strong atheists commonly claim that the combination of attributes which God may be asserted to have (For example: omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, transcendence, omnibenevolence) is logically contradictory, incomprehensible, or absurd, and therefore that the non-existence of such a God is a priori. Similarly, explicit atheism may argue that any assertions about this are irrational and impossible.

Weak atheism

The weak atheism conclusion is that there is no reason to believe in God or gods, for reasons other than evidence of their nonexistence. Weak atheists argue that merely pointing out the flaws or lack of soundness in all arguments for the existence of God is sufficient to show that God's existence is less probable than his nonexistence; by Occam's Razor (the principle of parsimony), the burden of proof lies on the advocate of that alternative which is less probable. By this reasoning, an atheist who is able to refute any argument for the existence of God encountered is justified in taking an atheist view; atheism is thus the "default" position. This objection is often stated in terms that relate it to the burden of proof: It is incumbent upon advocates of a God's existence to establish that fact, and they have not done so.

Agnosticism

Agnostics hold that the existence of God or any deity is uncertain or unknown. Possible reasons for holding this view are a belief that the existence of any deity has not yet been sufficiently proven, that the existence of a deity cannot be proven, or, quite simply, that claims about the existence or non-existence of any deity make no sense. Agnostics may claim that it isn't possible to have absolute or certain knowledge of supernatural beings or, alternatively, that while certainty may be possible, they personally have no such knowledge. Agnostics may or may not still believe in gods based on Fideilistic convictions.

See also

• Agnosticism
• Apologetics
• Atheism
• Babel Fish
• Deism
• Gödel's ontological proof
• God in Buddhism
• God in Sikhism
• Metaphysics
• Myth
• Mythology
• Philosophy of religion
• Polemic
• Problem of evil
• Quinquae viae
• Rationalism
• Strong atheism
• Theism
• Weak atheism

Further reading

• The Classical Islamic Arguments for the Existence of God by Majid Fakhry
• Philosophy of Religion .Info Introductory articles on philosophical arguments about the existence of God (for and against)
• A Logical Argument
• A collection of arguments for the existence of God
• Jesus Evidence Arguments for the existence of God based upon the evidence for Jesus Christ.
• Christian Bible God/Jesus Truth A collection of Bible quotes pertaining to the flawed morality of God.
• Arguments for the Existence of God from the Christian Cadre.
• Proofs of God's Existence - Islam - Ahmadiyyat
• Gnosos An agnostic examination of arguments for God's existence.
• Arguments for Atheism from Infidels.org
• StrongAtheism.net References page A listing of references containing atheistic arguments.
• Over Three Hundred Proofs of God's Existence A parody of theistic arguments.
• The Existence of God - Catholic Encyclopedia

References and Further Reading

• Broad, C.D. "Arguments for the Existence of God," Journal of Theological Studies 40 (1939): 16-30; 156-67.
• Jordan, Jeff. "Pragmatic Arguments for Belief in God", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2004 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
• Cohen, Morris R. "The Dark Side of Religion," Religion Today, a Challenging Enigma, ed. Arthur L. Swift, Jr. (1933). Revised version in Morris Cohen, The Faith of a Liberal (1946).
• Haisch, Bernard. The God Theory: Universes, Zero-Point Fields and What's Behind It All. Red Wheel/Weiser Books, 2006.
• Hume, David. 1779, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Richard Popkin (ed), Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998.
• Mackie, J.L. The Miracle of Theism. Oxford, Eng.: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982.
• Nielson, Kai. Ethics Without God. London: Pemberton Books, 1973.
• Oppy, Graham. "Ontological Arguments", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2005 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
• Paley, William, 1802, Natural Theology. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963.
• Plantinga, Alvin. Warranted Christian Belief. Oxford Univ. Press, 1993.
• Pojman, Louis P. Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, Fourth Ed., Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2003. ISBN 0-534-54364-2.
• Ratzsch, Del. "Teleological Arguments for God's Existence", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2005 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
• Rouvière, Jean-Marc, Brèves méditations sur la création du monde L'Harmattan, Paris (2006), ISBN 2-7475-9922-1.
• Swinburne, Richard. The Existence of God. New York: Clarendon, 1991.

Bibliography

• Hartshore, Charles, The Logic of Perfection (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1962)
• Malcolm, Norman, "Anselm's Ontological Argument," Philosophical Review, vol. 69, no. 1 (1960), 41-62
• Plantinga, Alvin, The Ontological Argument from St. Anselm to Contemporary Philosophers (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965)
• Plantinga, Alvin. God, Freedom and Evil. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1977) pp.85-112

See also

• Overviews: Arguments for the existence of God, Arguments against the existence of God
• Other major attempted proofs: Cosmological argument, Teleological argument, Argument from morality
• Gödel's ontological proof for the existence of God
• Pascal's Wager

External links

• Ontological Arguments — from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Kenneth Einar Himma, The Ontological Argument — from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Medieval Sourcebook: Gaunilo: In Behalf of the Fool, and Anselm's Reply
• Medieval Sourcebook: Philosophers' Criticisms of Anselm's Ontological Argument for the Being of God
• Paul E. Oppenheimer & Edward N. Zalta, "On the Logic of the Ontological Argument" from James Tomberlin ed., Philosophical Perspectives 5: The Philosophy of Religion (Atascadero: Ridgeview, 1991) pp. 509–529
• Peter Millican, "The one fatal flaw in Anselm's argument" from Mind Vol.113, pp451ff (2004)
• Gregory S. Neal: "Anselm's Ontological Argument For the Existence of God" from Grace Incarnate (1990)

Philosophy Portal

External links

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry

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