The Argument For God's Existence

1. The Cosmological Argument for the existence of God is based on the principle of cause and effect. What this basically means is that the universe was the effect of a cause, which was God. One of the oldest and most well known advocates of the Cosmological Argument was Thomas Aquinas who outlines his argument for the existence of God in his article entitled The Five Ways. The first way in his argument is deals with motion. Aquinas says that in order for something to be in motion something had to move it because it is impossible for something to move without the presence of some sort of outside force upon it. Therefore the world around us, nature, and our very existence could not have been put into motion without the influence of the

Genesis 1-3 contains the creation story, so the origin of the earth. Describing events before human existence it cannot be a report of historical events. By definition, the creation story is a myth, as its topic is “beyond anyone’s experience or total understanding” (Ralph & Walters, 2001). To fully understand the story, one must consider the ancient context of the time Genesis was written. Documented after the Babylonian exile, the first creation story aims to re-establish the beliefs of the Israelites. While being held captive in Babylon, Judahites were confronted with beliefs opposing to their own. For instance, Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation story, displays the faith in a good spirit, but bad matter. On the contrary, Israelites believed in the goodness of all. Furthermore, Babylonians assumed that humans were, at their core, not good. Genesis was therefore written as a contrast to Enuma Elish, emphasising and reaffirming the Israelites’ believe of humans being good, because they were created in the image of God (Ralph & Walters, 2001). A fundamentalist point of view does not take the beliefs of the time into account. It is impossible to fully appreciate the distinct theology of Genesis without considering Enuma Elish and other ancient narratives. Another major distinction between a fundamentalist and contextualist interpretation of the first creation story is how the cultural setting of the author determines the narrative. Contextualists correctly understand that the origin of Sabbath is due to the workweek structure of the author’s society. Contrasting, fundamentalists presume that because the story presents God’s point of view, Sabbath must originate from God resting on the seventh day. Misinterpreting these details leads to misunderstanding the relationship between God and humans. God had to work through human authors to pass on knowledge and insight

The famous William Paley has a different ontological argument within his text Natural Theology. The title of the reading gives insight to the theory, which focuses on something called natural design. The writing is based on an intricate and extensive analogy between the man made and the natural. For instance, Paley describes a man made watch in great detail. This intense detail sets the notion that each piece must have been put in place by someone, whom we can infer is a watchmaker. He then compares this to the intricacy of nature, which must have been made by a supreme diety. Such complexity could not have come about by chance. Only the most

One of the fundamental questions that religions seek to answer is that of origin. How was man put on earth? Why and from what was he created? Who created him? What does his creation imply about the status of human beings? Some or all of these questions are answered by a religion’s creation stories. Every religion’s creation myths attempt to give solutions to problems present to that religious society. Because of this, each religion may have one or more creation stories, each of those different from one another in the questions they ask and the answers they give.

Descartes’ ontological argument is an echo of the original ontological argument for the existence of God as proposed by St. Anselm in the 11th century. To illustrate the background of the ontological argument, Anselm’s argument works within a distinct framework of ontology that posits the existence of God as necessity by virtue of its definition. In other words, for the mind to conceive of an infinite, perfect God, ultimately implies that there must indeed be a perfect God that embodies existence, for perfection cannot merely exist as a mental phenomenon. God is, according to Anselm, self-evident in the mind. Criticisms to this argument can be found in Anselm’s contemporary, Gaunilo, who argues that such an argument can be used to - put

The ways that the Navajo and Judeo-Christians view the story of creation are starkly different, and they shed light onto the cultural differences between the two groups. Many things can be inferred from the ways these tales differ, but in this paper I will be analyzing the different things these stories imply about human nature. The Judeo-Christian story of Genesis describes humans as something close to the divine and different in nature from the beings around them. They are the center of the story, and the events they run into are about their relationship with their own humanity. The Navajo story of The Emergence treats humanity as on the same level as the rest of nature, and their struggle is one with the world around them.

Does God exist? This question has been in debate for centuries with many opposing views, some arising from philosophers on the same side while others refute Gods existence altogether. However for this particular paper I will be taking the best explanations approach. What I mean by this is I do not have proof of God’s existence but the existence of God is the best explanation for the universe around me. With this statement in mind we will discuss arguments in support of God’s existence as well as philosopher H.J McCloskey’s article On Being an Atheist.

The Cosmological Argument, in my opinion, does provide "proof" that a God or Superhuman being exist. According Rowe (2007), the Cosmological Argument lies with the fundamental premise of Principle of Sufficient Reason or PSR (Rowe, 2007). However, Rowe would argue that no one has succeeded at showing  that PSR is an assumption that most of us share (Rowe, 2007, p.32). As far as "proof", I believe the argument does a "sufficient" job at proving God's existence using a logical argument of deductive validity. Deductive validity identifies the premise of the argument asking only one question, If the premises were true, would its conclusion have to be true (Rowe, 2007, p. 22). A yes or no answer to this vital question will help you to reach a conclusion.

The design arguments for the existence of God center on the principle that an intelligent designer, in this case God, has crafted our world so that each item has a purpose and significant meaning. Additionally, the world is a complex and sometimes enigmatic system of elements which work together to sustain life in a way that some argue is unlikely to have occurred by pure chance alone. Therefore, some philosophers credit a divine being as the source of this order and purpose in the universe. Furthermore, William Paley offers a version of the design argument in which he employs simple analogy between a watchmaker and God to demonstrate God’s presence. However, critics of this approach to proving God’s existence object to this simplistic analogy of the origin of natural components in the world and instead argue that an evolutionary perspective better explains the existence of such objects and therefore, for the sake of simplicity, a divine being does not need to remain in the equation. As a result, both the objections of flaws in the format of Paley’s argument and the needless inclusion of God as a designer cannot successfully be refuted by supporters of Paley.

The idea of God, more so than the idea of some substance that is finite/imperfect, has an objective

This week's reading sparked memories of my childhood where I asked questions like "what is the last number in the world?", or "who is God's mom?", and getting the answer, "infinity", or "he is his own mom", was beyond my understanding. However, the three different arguments for God's existence are not beyond my understanding and although I agree in some measure, these arguments can be easily grasped. Cosmological, teleological, and ontological arguments can be summarized as: because "this", God exists. Cosmological arguments state that because the universe exists, so does God. Most philosophers with this argument agreed that the universe did not just appear and something had to create it. Teleological arguments follow the same premise whereas

This argument contends that an intelligent designer of the world does exist, and structured the universe so that most natural things fit together for a clear purpose. We can recognize that things in nature seem to be made for specific reasons that are too fortunate to be accidental. For instance, we observe that giraffes have extremely long necks and conveniently eat from the tops of trees. We can also identify that planet earth is just the right distance from the sun and moon to sustain human life. If either of these things were less ideal, there would be drastically worse outcomes for the giraffes and humans on earth. The harmony we witness in nature compels the belief in an intelligent designer.

A logical argument for God’s existence or nonexistence is the cosmological argument. William Craig says in his book that there are three statements that give the cosmological argument form. Craig concluded that whatever begins to exist has a cause. The Universe began to exist therefore the Universe had a cause. What that cause was, is widely challenged. The argument against the existence of God includes the Big Bang Theory. The Big Bang Model is a broadly accepted theory for the beginning and evolution of our universe. According to NASA, it claims that twelve to fourteen billion years ago, the part of the universe that can be seen today was only a few millimeters across. It has since expanded from this hot dense state into the vast and much cooler cosmos that is inhabited. Remnants of this hot dense matter as the now very cold cosmic microwave background radiation can be seen which still pervades the universe and is visible to microwave detectors as a uniform glow across the entire sky. Those who say that God does not exist use this as their argument to explain how the universe was created. Those who support this theory say that the universe resulted from a big bang and everything that is in existence came from this phenomenon. In talking about the Big Bang Theory, Jeffrey Keen said, “In general, science accepts that both the structure of the universe and the laws of physics were created simultaneously at the beginning of the Big Bang, and have since remained constant

The argument for the existence of God that I found most compelling was the argument from design, also known as the “theological argument.” The reason that I resonated with this argument so well is that it could be used by both sides of the debate for the existence of God. Supporters of this argument claim that due to the design of everything in the natural world and how well all things interact with one another, this clearly points that there is a creator that made these things meld so well together, this creator being God. Non-believers argue that the existence of our world is a mere stroke of luck that was created through random chance. They further argue that although the possibility that a world such as ours would come into existence is astronomically slim, due to the universe begin infinite and never-ending, this outcome is much more likely to occur.

Throughout the course of this essay we shall examine two of the major philosophical arguments for the existence of God. The arguments that we are going to focus on shall be the Design argument and the Ontological argument. We shall compare, evaluate and discuss both the Design (or teleological) argument for the existence of God and the Ontological Argument for the existence of God, as well as highlighting philosophical criticisms of both theories too. By doing so, we shall attempt to draw a satisfactory conclusion and aim gain a greater understanding of the respective theories and their criticisms of each theory.