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God is just one of those topics that you have to be very careful when dealing with it. Many people have a lot of beliefs and emotions tied into God, so when you begin to attack those beliefs, people tend to get reactionary and go after the person going against those beliefs. So please do not take this discussion about God personally. I am just presenting the philosophical view of God and how to try to prove its existence. I will try not to cater to any one religion, but any discussion about God will almost always lean toward Christianity's definition of God. To start, lets discuss God's characteristics. The main ones are omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. This means that God is all-powerful, all-knowing (knows past, present, and future all at the same time), and all-loving. Fairly straight-forward, but then again this definition is what causes problems with the supposed existence of evil, but this will require a separate section, so keep an eye out for it. Now I will begin discussing some arguments that support God. The first one is the Cosmological argument. This says that everything is caused. This works fine since determinism and cause-and-effect is true beyond any shadow of a doubt. Now there must have been something to start this chain of cause-and-effect; a "first cause". This is said to be God. The problem with this is that it is contradictory. If everything is caused, there then must be a cause for God by definition. So this has been accepted as false. The next supposed proof of God's existence is the design argument. This says that since the world is so complicated, yet works so well, it must of been designed. Now this does not hold any water since this is a subjective viewpoint and not everyone would agree that it is designed that well. So this one is also considered false. The last argument that I will discuss is also the most difficult. It took me a while to figure out this argument, but the Ontological argument is the most powerful that I know of. First, lets state the definition of God in another way; God is a being in which there can be no greater. Make sure you truly understand what that means. Now lets say that you and me sit down and think of all the characteristics. To keep it simple lets say that we both think that God is omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent. Now I believe God exists but you don't. So, the only difference between your version of God and mine is that my God exists. So whose God is greater? Mine. Since my God exists, giving it one more characteristic, my God is greater, so my God fits the definition of God better than yours, making my definition true and yours false. Thus God exists. :) There is a fault with this support for God's existence, though. Now what if I say that there is a perfect island. The only difference between my perfect island and yours is that I say mine exists. So my island is the better definition, so then this perfect island exists, right? Wrong. We know for a fact that no such island exists. So then the Ontological argument does not work, right? Not necessarily. Since the island is only perfect by characteristic, and not by basic definition like God, it does not have definition of perfection, negating this argument against the Ontological argument. Some don't agree with this way of dealing with the perfect island argument, so it is your call. So where does that leave us? Faith. Ask any theologian and they will tell you that there is really no proof of God's existence and you must rely on faith. So then I guess we are just back to where we started... |