Matt asked:

Outline the philosophical arguments that try to prove the existence of God. What are their faults? Is
there any one 'plausible' theory?

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Since God's existence can't be proved by observation or experiment, most arguments for the
existence of God are based on the principle of sufficient reason, which makes all of them only more
or less plausible.

By "God" we normally have and use the concept of an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good and
supernatural creator. Just because from having that concept it of course doesn't necessarily follow
that God exists. So several attempts have been made by philosophers and theologians to proof God's
existence, which fall into three groups:

*rationalist proofs from the concept of God itself (a priori or purely conceptual arguments)

*empirical proofs based on the existence of the world/the universe

*pragmatic and moral proofs (based on the demands of morality, the existence of beauty, the
normativity of human rationality, religious experience, etc.), which will not be discussed here in detail,
as they do not offer proofs in the narrower sense.

The various versions of the ontological argument constitute the first group. They have the advantage
of concluding straightforwardly to a necessary existence of God. The earliest and most famous
version of the ontological argument by Anselm of Canterbury (chapter 2 of his Proslogion) can be
summarised as follows:

*We understand God to be something than which nothing greater can be conceived

*Because of having this concept, God at least exists in our minds

*Either God exists in our minds alone or both in the mind and in the extra-mental reality

*What exists is greater than what does not exist

*If God existed only in our mind, then we could conceive of a being than which nothing greater can be
conceived that also existed in extra-mental reality

*If God is a being than which nothing greater can be conceived and what exists is greater than what
does not exist, it follows that God exists.

As a classical critique to this Immanuel Kant argued that existence is not a real predicate: To say that
something falls under a concept does not add to the content of that concept, it is therefore analytic
and the result is a tautological argument. Kant compared the argument with the following: There is no
difference between the concept of a hundred real and a hundred imaginary pounds. Whether they
actually exist cannot be deduced from the concept of a hundred pounds.

Consequently Kant himself made no attempt to prove God's existence, but thought the idea of God to
be necessary, because without it morality would be impossible (So Kant's argument belongs to group
(c).)

In the group (b) belong the cosmological arguments appealing to general features of the world, and
teleological arguments based on more special features.

The cosmological argument rests in the observation, that one thing is always caused by another and
this in turn by something else prior to it. We then argue, that since there cannot be an infinite regress,
there must be an unconditioned First Cause or God. It was Thomas Aquinas, who presented the
cosmological argument from three standpoints in his Summa Theologiae:

*Whatever is in motion must have been moved by something else. It follows, that without the First
Mover there would be no motion.

*In the world of sense there is an order of efficient causes. If there was no First Cause, there couldn't
be intermediate or ultimate causes

*The world could also have not been. Therefore the world is not self-explanatory. To explain it's
existence we have to go beyond the world to a force, who has it's own necessity (otherwise it could
also have not existed) and has the knowledge and power to create a world.

Among the many objections that have been made against the cosmological argument, are the
following:

*The postulation of a First Cause is either self contradictory or arbitrary: If it is claimed, there are no
uncaused causes, how can there be then a First Cause?

*Why should there not be an infinite regress? It is possible, that our present (expanding) universe
emerged from the collapse of a previous (contracting) universe, and so on ad infinitum.

The teleological arguments for the existence of God centre on the design of the universe (therefore
often called the argument from design). Before the concept of evolution, the universe was seen as a
perfect mechanism designed by God the Creator. The most famous version is known as 'Paley's
Watch' after William Paley. He argued that the existence of a clockwork demanded the existence of a
watchmaker. Paley reasoned by analogy, that the universe with it's immensity, complexity, and
orderliness needed an extremely intelligent and powerful designer. As teleological arguments focus
more on orderliness of the parts and processes of the world and on the purposiveness of the many
things in nature, than a certain prove for a (individual) God, perhaps these are the most plausible
arguments for the existence of God in the end.

Simone Klein