Existence of God

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Many arguments about the Existence of God have been proposed by philosophers, theologians, and other thinkers. This article lists some of the more common arguments, especially those covered in the area of philosophy of religion. In philosophical terminology, this article introduces schools of thought on the epistemology of the ontology of God.

This article provides an introduction to the philosophical issues, arguments (for and against) and conclusions concerning the existence of God or gods.

Contents

Philosophical issues

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

See main articles: Definition, God, Deity, Ontology

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 Vedantan 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 mythologies 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 universally 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

See main articles: Epistemology, Sociology of knowledge

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 (cf. Dr. C. Braig, Gottesbeweis oder Gottesbeweise?, Stuttgart, 1889). 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. (Summ. theol., I, Q. ii, a.3)

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".
The Pantheistic argument defines God as All; it is similar to monism and panentheism.

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.

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?. (Stuttgart, 1908)

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.(A. Stöckl, Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, II, 82 sqq.) 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: Or, On Education|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.(Stöckl, loc. cit., 199 sqq.)
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." [ucsd.edu/~eebbesen]

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 (or theodicy) 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.

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, but this argument is flawless if you accept its premises.

The argument from free will contests the existence of an omniscient god who has free will by arguing that the two properties are contradictory.

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, [materialist apologetics], 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.

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.

Conclusions

Conclusions on the existence of God can be roughly divided into two camps: theist and atheist. Both of these 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:

doctrines that belong essentially to faith and cannot be proved, such as the doctrine of the Trinity or the Incarnation, and
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".(Bible, Romans 1:20)

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

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. Alvin Plantinga. The Nature of Necessity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974) page 63. "An object has all its world-indexed properties in every world in which it exists. So if we take an object x and a property P and worlds W and W* such that x has the properties of having-P-in-W and having-non-P-in-W*, we will find that x also has the properties of having-P-in-W-in-W* and having-non-P-in-W*-in-W."

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-existance, 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 the 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. 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.

Notes

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.

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