Arguments For The Existence Of God

ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

Does God exist? That is a question that human beings have been asking themselves during their entire existence. Many people have tried to answer that question, but no one has been able to prove or negate the existence of God. This has always been one of the great questions of mankind, and is also probably the most debated one. Is there a way to prove theexistence of God? We will try to see a couple of arguments for the existence of God and try to see if we can.
But before we can even start to talk about God we must first try to define what God is. Well, people usually think of God as the creator of everything, He being omniscient, omnipresent, omniscient and omibenevolent. He is a supreme being.
One of the first arguments ever made for theexistence of God was created by Anselm (1033-1109). He was a rationalist who tried to prove the existence of God through an ontological argument. Being an ontological argument he started with a definition of God, his definition was: “A being to which nothing greater can be imagined.” Then he gave a deductive argument. He said that nothing greater than God can be imagined. He then said that if God onlyexisted in imagination and not in reality we could all imagine an even greater being that existed both in imagination and reality. That being which we imagined would be greater than God, which he said that could not happen because according to his definition nothing greater than God can be imagined. So God can’t exist only in imagination. Therefore the big conclusion is that God exists in bothimagination and reality.
Well we could say that through his ontological argument Anselm has proved the existence of God because that was his guaranteed conclusion. But if we remember the characteristics of a deductive argument, in order to get a guaranteed conclusion you must first have two true and real premises. Are Anselm’s premises true?
He gave a definition of God, which was his firstpremise. The dictionary can’t be wrong right? Well if we look in a dictionary we can find a definition of a vampire or a definition of a werewolf. Does that mean that because a definition can be given of something that thing is real? No. A definition doesn’t necessitate reality and that was one of Anselm’s big mistakes and one that followed to other philosophers like him who tried to prove the existenceof God through ontological arguments.
But there is even another problem with Anselm’s proposition. He sais that God is a being to which nothing greater can be imagined. So he must be perfect, even better than perfect! Well what is perfection? I think we all have different visions of perfection. Not all of us see perfection the same way. It’s a personal point of view thing. But perfection can’tbe reached, because we can always add something to perfection. If you think of it and try to visualize a “perfect” world you would never finish. You can always keep adding things to that perfection making it impossible to achieve.
Well Anselm had one thing to say about these flaws that people found in his argument, he said: “I have written the following treatise in the person of one who seeks tounderstand what he believes in”. This makes this argument an argument made for people who already believe in God. So how can we say that this argument proved the existence of God if we have already seen some flaws and even the creator of the argument said he only did it for persons who believed in God. Therefore we can say that this argument is wrong and that we still haven’t proved the existenceof God.
We’ve already looked at a rationalist argument for the existence of God and it was unable to prove it, so we are now going to look at an empirical argument for the existence of God: The Design Argument. This was created by Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). He saw that the world has two characteristics: Order and Regularity. That the world has a design and that every design needs a designer...