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Existence of God

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Arguments for and against the existence of God 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. The debate concerning the existence of God raises many philosophical issues. A basic problem is that there is no universally accepted definition of God. Some definitions of God's existence are so non-specific that it is certain that something exists that meets the definition; in stark contrast, other definitions are apparently self-contradictory. Arguments for the existence of God typically include metaphysical, empirical, inductive, and subjective types. Arguments against the existence of God typically include empirical, deductive, and inductive types. Viewpoints represented include atheism, either no belief in God or the view that God does not exist; theism, the view that God exists; and agnosticism, the view that whether or not God exists is unknown or unknowable.

Contents [hide]

1 Philosophical issues

1.1 Definition of God's existence

1.2 Epistemology

1.2.1 The problem of the supernatural

1.2.2 Nature of relevant Proofs/Arguments

2 Arguments for the existence of God

2.1 Arguments from historical events or personages

2.2 Inductive arguments (for)

2.3 Arguments from testimony (for)

2.3.1 Arguments grounded in personal experience

3 Arguments against the existence of God

3.1 Empirical arguments (against)

3.2 Deductive arguments (against)

3.3 Inductive arguments (against)

3.4 Subjective arguments (against)

4 Conclusions

4.1 Theism

4.1.1 God exists and this can be demonstrated

4.1.2 God exists, but this cannot be demonstrated or refuted

4.2 Atheism

4.2.1 Strong atheism

4.2.2 Weak atheism

4.3 Agnosticism

5 See also

6 Further reading

7 Notes

8 References and Further Reading

[edit] Philosophical issues

[edit] Definition of God's existence

Main articles: Definition, God, Deity, and 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 does the term 'God' mean?"

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"? 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 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". Other philosophical approaches take a logically simple definition of God such as "the Prime Mover" or "the Uncaused Cause",[1] or "the Ultimate Creator"[2] or "a being greater than which nothing can be conceived"[3] from which the classical properties may be deduced.[4] By contrast Pantheists do not believe in a personal God, for example Spinoza and his philosophical followers (such as Einstein) use the term 'God' in a particular philosophical sense, to mean (roughly) the essential substance/principles of Nature.[5]

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.[6] What we ordinarily perceive, that is a world of many things, is brought on by consequences of our actions.[citation needed] 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.

[edit] Epistemology

Main articles: Epistemology and 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 counts as evidence for objective reality

* whether either logic or evidence can rule in or out the supernatural.

[edit] The problem of the supernatural

One problem posed by the question of the existence of a God is that traditional beliefs usually ascribe to 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. In addition, on most concepts of God, God is not part of the natural order, but the ultimate creator of nature and of the scientific laws.

Another problem with equating God with the supernatural is defining what constitutes "supernatural?" Certainly, in ancient times, much of the phenomena previously thought to be supernatural has been shown to be natural phenomena by modern science. Also, in many religions, Judaism in particular, God often acts through Nature and uses natural phenomena to achieve His will. The Ten Plagues of Egypt is a good example.

Religious apologists offer the supernatural nature of God as one explanation of the inability of empirical methods to decide the question of 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 in the domain of scientific investigation. The Non-overlapping Magisteria view proposed by Steven Gould also holds that the existence (or otherwise) of God is beyond the domain of Science.

Proponents of intelligent design (I.D.) believe there is empirical evidence for Irreducible complexity pointing to the existence of an intelligent creator, though their claims are challenged by most in the scientific community. In addition most scientifically literate theists, whether or not they are proponents of I.D. are impressed by Anthropic Fine-tuning. However reliance on phenomena which have not yet been resolved by natural explanations may be equated to the pejorative God of the gaps.

Logical positivists, such as Rudolph Carnap and A. J. Ayer viewed 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.

[edit] Nature of relevant Proofs/Arguments

Since God (of the kind to which the Proofs/Arguments relate) is neither an entity in the Universe nor a mathematical object it is not obvious what kinds of arguments/proofs are relevant to God's existence. Even if the concept of scientific proof were not problematic, the fact that there is no conclusive scientific proof of the existence, or non-existence, of God[7] mainly demonstrates that the existence of God is not a normal scientific question. John Polkinghorne suggests that the nearest analogy to the existence of God in Physics are the ideas of Quantum Mechanics which are paradoxical but make sense of a great deal of disparate data.[8] However you cannot do experiments on God, and (if God exists) God created the laws of Physics and is not necessarily bound by them, so it will inevitably be more difficult to reason reliably about God.

Alvin Plantinga compares the question of the existence of God to the question of the existence of other minds: both of which are notoriously impossible to "prove" against a determined skeptic[9]

One approach is to treat (particular versions of) the existence of God or Naturalism as though they were two hypotheses in the Bayesian sense, to list certain data (or alleged data), about the world, and to suggest that the likelihoods of these data are significantly higher under one hypothesis than the other[10] Most of the arguments for, or against, the existence of God can be seen as pointing to particular aspects of the universe in this way. In almost all cases it is not seriously suggested by proponents of the arguments that they are irrefutable, merely that they make one worldview seem significantly more likely than the other. However since an assessment of the weight of evidence depends on the Prior probability that is assigned to each worldview, arguments that a theist finds convincing may seem thin to an atheist and vice-versa.

[edit] Arguments for the existence of God

* The Cosmological argument argues that there was a "first cause", or "prime mover" who is identified as God.

* The Teleological argument argues that the universe's order and complexity shows signs of purpose (telos), and that it must have been designed by a Being with properties that only God could have.

* The Ontological argument is based on arguments about a "being greater than God can not be conceived".

* The Pantheistic argument defines God as All and is an argument similar to monism and panentheism.

* The mind-body problem argument postulates that it is impossible to grasp the relation of consciousness to materiality without introducing a divinity.

* Arguments that some non-physical quality observed in the universe is of fundamental importance and not an epiphenomenon, such as justice, beauty, love or religious experience.

* 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 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).

* Arguments based on specific historical events or personages. The most prominent of these are listed below.

[edit] Arguments from historical events or personages

* Judaism asserts that God intervened in key specific moments in history, especially at the Exodus and the giving of the Ten Commandments, thus demonstrating his special care for the Jewish people, and a fortiori his existence.

* The argument from the life of Jesus. This asserts that Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, that in this he was either deluded, deceitful or truthful, and that it is possible to assess Jesus's character sufficiently from the accounts of his life and teaching to rule out the first two possibilities. C S Lewis put forward this argument (the Trilemma) and it is followed in the widely adopted Alpha Course.[11]

* The argument from the Resurrection of Jesus. This asserts that there is sufficient historical evidence for Jesus's resurrection and that this vindicates his claim to be Son of God and a fortiori God's existence.[12] The claim that the resurrection validates Christianity dates from the earliest records, and it is common ground between theists and atheists that if the resurrection occurred substantially as described in the Bible then Christianity is substantially true: non-Christians simply dispute the premise.

* Islam asserts that the life of Mohammed and especially the giving of the Koran by an Angel similarly vindicates Islam.

* Mormonism similarly asserts that the miraculous finding of the Book of Mormon vindicates Mormonism.

[edit] 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; an act of will (i.e. faith) is required to dismiss these difficulties. This view is maintained, among others, by the Scottish 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?. [13]

[edit] Arguments from testimony (for)

Arguments from testimony rely on the testimony or experience of certain witnesses, possibly embodying the propositions of a specific revealed religion. Swinburne argues that it is a principle of rationality that one should accept testimony unless there are strong reasons for not doing so.[14]

* 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 Majority argument argues that the theism of people throughout most of recorded history and in many different places provides prima facie demonstration of God's existence.

[edit] 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.[15] 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.[16]

* 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.")

[edit] 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.

[edit] Empirical arguments (against)

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

* 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 apparent contradictions between different scriptures, within a single scripture, or between scripture and known facts.

* The problem of evil contests the existence of a God who is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent by arguing that such a God should not permit the existence of evil or suffering. The theist responses are called theodicies.

* The argument from poor design contests the idea that God created life on the basis that lifeforms exist which seem to exhibit poor design.

* 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 Christian claim that God wants humans to be free to choose whether to believe or not[17]. Judaism teaches that the mass miracles recounted in the Tanakh, especially during the exodus from Egypt, should be enough to give humans sufficient free will. Any more obvious acts of God would eliminate the free will necessary to earn reward.

[edit] Deductive arguments (against)

Deductive arguments attempt to prove their conclusions by deductive reasoning from true premises. These arguments inherently depend on specific definitions of the term "God".

* The omnipotence paradox suggests that the concept of an omnipotent God is logically contradictory, from considering a question like: "Can God create a rock so big that He Himself could not lift it?".

* Another argument suggests that there is a contradiction between God being omniscient and omnipotent, basically asking "how can an All-Knowing Being change His mind?" See the the article on omniscience for details.

* The argument from free will contests the existence of an omniscient god who has free will - or has allotted the same freedom to his creations - by arguing that the two properties are contradictory. If God already knows the future, then humanity is destined to corroborate with his knowledge of the future and not have true free will to deviate from it. Therefore our free will contradicts an omniscient god. Obviously, such an argument assumes the truth of free will within human agents. Such an argument, however, is refuted by those who state that God is above time and exists in every moment. Furthermore, simple knowledge of a person's actions would not necessarily influence how one arrived upon those actions. While many theologians maintain that God is able to control a person's actions yet allows that person to decide upon those actions, some suggest that God has deliberately limited his omniscience and omnipotence to allow freewill[18]

* The Transcendental argument for the non-existence of God contests the existence of an intelligent creator by suggesting 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, [19], 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 nonsensical to talk about a state "before" the universe which could have caused it, since cause requires time. This depends on the definition of God used not entailing that God is un-created, since asking "who created an un-created God?" is meaningless.

* Theological noncognitivism, as used in literature, usually seeks to disprove the god-concept by showing that it is unverifiable by scientific tests.

* 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 constraints of time.[20]

[edit] 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 if 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." Theists argue that such views of God do not necessarily define God and that such an analysis is not necessarily correct. They argue that God is outside of time and space and thus the premises for this argument are meaningless.

* 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. A common counterargument is that God, being the epitome of good, desires to bestow good upon Man. An argument against this is that good is obviously greatly deprived from Man, though many refute this by stating it was Adam's desire to earn goodness which led to the current balance of good and evil. According to this, God is waiting for Man to remove all evil before bestowing eternal good upon Man.

[edit] Subjective arguments (against)

Similar to the subjective arguments for the existence of God, subjective arguments against the supernatural mainly rely on the testimony or experience of witnesses, or the propositions of a revealed religion in general.

* The witness argument gives credibility to personal witnesses, contemporary and from the past, who disbelieve or strongly doubt the existence of God.

* The conflicted religions argument where specific religions give differing accounts as to what God is and what God wants. All the contradictory accounts cannot be correct, so many if not all religions must be incorrect.

[edit] Conclusions

Conclusions on the existence of God can be roughly divided into three camps: theist, atheist and agnostic.

[edit] Theism

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

[edit] God exists and this can be demonstrated

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".[21]

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.

[edit] God exists, but this cannot be demonstrated or refuted

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 existence is supported by such arguments, assuming they are valid. 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. Most of these arguments 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",[22] 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.

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 a "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 proven in a mathematical sense. Plantinga equates knowledge of God's existence with kinds of knowledge that are rational but do not proceed through proof, such as sensory knowledge.[23]

[edit] Atheism

Atheism has historically been defined as the belief that god does not exist[24]. However some atheists[citation needed] have controversially[25] re-defined Atheism as "the absence of belief in gods", and further subdivided atheism into weak and strong atheism:

[edit] Strong atheism

Strong atheism, identical with what has historically been called atheism, is the position that a god or gods do not exist. The strong atheist explicitly asserts god's non-existence[26]. Some strong atheists further assert that the existence of some or all gods is logically impossible, for example claiming 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 true[citation needed].

[edit] Weak atheism

The controversial term weak atheism is used of those who do not believe that a god or gods exists. If this definition is accepted, agnostics, and those who have no beliefs of any kind about God, are "weak atheists". There is no evidence that this is accepted by agnostics in general, and obviously it cannot be accepted by those who have no beliefs of any kind about God.

[edit] Agnosticism

The term agnosticism refers to the philosophical position of not knowing whether or not God exists, specifically in distinction from theism and atheism. A stronger form of this position, also called agnosticism, is that the question of whether or not God exists cannot be known - this is sometimes called "strong" agnosticism. This seems to have been the position of Thomas Huxley who coined the term[27] - however other self-described Agnostics like Anthony Kenny hold the "weaker" position[28].

[edit] See also

Theism topics

v • d • e

God Goddess Existence of God Divinity Deity

Polytheism Monolatry Henotheism Kathenotheism Eutheism

Monotheism Deism Monism Pantheism Panentheism

Atheism topics

v • d • e

List of atheists Demographics Religion History State atheism

Criticism Discrimination Persecution Nontheism Weak and strong

Agnostic atheism Implicit and explicit Antitheism Arguments

* Apologetics

* Conceptions of God

* God in Buddhism

* God in Hinduism

* God in Sikhism

* Gödel's ontological proof

* Metaphysics

* Mythology

* Philosophy of religion

* Polemic

* Problem of evil

* Quinquae viae

* Rationalism

* Elohim

[edit] 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.

* Hundreds of Proofs of God’s Existence A parody of theistic arguments.

* The Existence of God - Catholic Encyclopedia

* TheTruthOnGod.com Atheist debate on the existence of God.

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Both following Aquinas, see Quinquae viae.

2. ^ A modern re-statement, see [1]

3. ^ Following Anselm's Ontological argument

4. ^ See Swinburne's Does God Exist? or Polkinghorne

5. ^ See the articles on them, and especially Einstein's 1940 paper in Nature

6. ^ Hebbar, Neria Harish. The Principal Upanishads. Retrieved on 2007-01-12.

7. ^ Agreed by everyone from Dawkins to Ward to Plantinga

8. ^ Polkinghorne, John (1998). Belief in God in an Age of Science. Yale University Press. ISBN 0300072945.

9. ^ see his God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God Cornell (1990) ISBN 0801497353 and Warranted Christian Belief OUP (2000) ISBN 0195131932

10. ^ See eg the Beale/Howson debtate published in Prospect

11. ^ See the books by Nicky Gumbel on the subject.

12. ^ Polkinghorne, John. Science and Christian Belief, pp. 108-122. Contains a highly scientifically-aware discussion of the evidence.

13. ^ (Stuttgart, 1908)

14. ^ Swinburne, Richard (1997). Is there a God?. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198235453.

15. ^ (A. Stöckl, Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, II, 82 sqq.)

16. ^ (Stöckl, loc. cit., 199 sqq.)

17. ^ see eg John Polkinghorne, Science and Religion

18. ^ eg Polkinghorne op. cit.

19. ^ materialist apologetics

20. ^ Baake, David. Cosmological Arguments Against the Existence of God. Retrieved on 2007-01-12.

21. ^ Romans 1:20

22. ^ 2 Timothy 3:14-15 NIV "But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus." (Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.)

23. ^ Plantinga, Alvin (1974). The Nature of Necessity. New York: Oxford University Press, 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”

24. ^ see eg Stanford Encycopedia of Philsophy

25. ^ Leading contemporary philosophers such as Anthony Kenny explicitly assert that they are Agnostics and not Atheists, see his What I Believe OUP 2006

26. ^ Richard Dawkins is the most famous contemporary example, in a line stretching back through Russell and Marx to the 18th Century

27. ^ see the SOED entry on Agnostic

28. ^ see Kenny op cit

[edit] References and Further Reading

Philosophy Portal

* 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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