Since the dawn of humanity, we have been asking ourselves, “is there a higher power, a being which created everything that exists?” At some point, we have all pondered this age-old question, and yet humanity has not yet reached a conclusion. Irish writer and scholar Adam Clarke once said, “Now it would be as absurd to deny the existence of God, because we cannot see him, as it would be to deny the existence of the air or wind, because we cannot see it.” Around 60% of the world believes in some kind of God or higher being. But what do we really know about the existence of God? Can we somehow discover God through intellectual thought, or are we searching for something that doesn’t exist? Let’s take a look at some of the core philosophical arguments for both sides of the discussion on God.
- Arguments for the existence of God
- First, we have Anselm’s ontological argument, which dates back to the 11th century. Anselm, the archbishop of Canterbury, proposed the ontological argument in the second chapter of a larger work titled the Proslogion. Ontological just means ‘relating to being or existence’, so this is an argument about whether God’s being can be proved just by thinking about the idea of God.
- Anselm’s view of God was that God was a being than which nothing greater can be conceived. Here is an excerpt from Anselm’s ontological argument: “Now we believe that you are something than which nothing greater can be thought.”
- Anselm argued that anything which exists in reality is greater than anything which does not exist in reality. So if God does not exist in reality, then he cannot be something than which nothing greater can be conceived. Therefore God must exist in reality in order to be God.
- What does it mean to be real? Anselm said that things exist in the mind, in reality, or in both. Things that exist in the mind but not reality are imaginary; they can be thought of, but don’t exist in reality. Second, other things exist in reality even if we haven’t thought of them yet, like an undiscovered planet. They’re real, even if they’re not in anyone’s mind. And third, things can exist in both the mind and reality, which describes the world that we perceive.
- So the first premise of his argument is that God exists in the mind, which is self-explanatory because people have an understanding of God in their mind. The second premise of his argument is that God is perfect if he exists both in the mind and in reality. The third premise is that God is perfect. This leads us to the conclusion that God exists in the mind and reality, and therefore is real.
- So, what’s wrong with Anselm’s Ontological Argument? Is one of its premises false? Is the argument invalid?
- One of Anselm’s contemporaries named Gaunilo wrote Anselm a letter that argued that the same logic could be used to “prove” the existence of any perfect thing. He asked Anselm that if he could imagine the greatest possible island, then must it exist too? What do you think—does Gaunilo’s critique work, or is there something unique about the concept of God that something like a perfect island doesn’t equate to? Did Anselm somehow prove the existence of God, or is there an error in his reasoning?
- Next, we have the cosmological argument. This one is quite simple in comparison to Anselm’s ontological argument. First proposed by Thomas Aquinas, a priest in the 13th century, the argument states that everything is caused by something else. But this can’t go back infinitely—so there must be a First Cause, and for Aquinas, that’s God. We can trace everything back to a point of origin, such as the Big Bang, but something caused that, and it would make sense to conclude that only an outside being could have done so.
- Fine tuning/design argument
II. Arguments against the existence of God
- “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?” ― Epicurus
Philosophy Speaks 
Leave a comment