OVERVIEW:

There are many sources of information that people use to infer what might be true about God, including observation and revelation:

The existence of God is a subject of debate in the philosophy of religion.[1] A wide variety of arguments for and against the existence of God can be categorized as logical, empirical, metaphysical, subjective or scientific. In philosophical terms, the question of the existence of God involves the disciplines of epistemology (the nature and scope of knowledge) and ontology (study of the nature of being or existence) and the theory of value (since some definitions of God include "perfection").

The Western tradition of philosophical discussion of the existence of God began with Plato and Aristotle, who made arguments for the existence of a being responsible for fashioning the universe, referred to as the demiurge or the unmoved mover, that today would be categorized as cosmological arguments. Other arguments for the existence of God have been proposed by St. Anselm, who formulated the first ontological argument; Thomas Aquinas, who presented his own version of the cosmological argument (the first way); René Descartes, who said that the existence of a benevolent God is logically necessary for the evidence of the senses to be meaningful. John Calvin argued for a sensus divinitatis, which gives each human a knowledge of God's existence. Islamic philosophers who developed arguments for the existence of God comprise Averroes, who made arguments influenced by Aristotle's concept of the unmoved mover; Al-Ghazali and Al-Kindi, who presented the Kalam cosmological argument; Avicenna, who presented the Proof of the Truthful; and Al-Farabi, who made Neoplatonic arguments.

In philosophy, and more specifically in the philosophy of religion, atheism refers to the proposition that God does not exist.[2] Some religions, such as Jainism, reject the possibility of a creator deity. Philosophers who have provided arguments against the existence of God include David Hume, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Bertrand Russell.

Theism, the proposition that God exists, is the dominant view among philosophers of religion.[3] In a 2020 PhilPapers survey, 69.50% of philosophers of religion stated that they accept or lean towards theism, while 19.86% stated they accept or lean towards atheism.[4] Prominent contemporary philosophers of religion who defended theism include Alvin Plantinga, Yujin Nagasawa, John Hick, Richard Swinburne, and William Lane Craig, while those who defended atheism include Graham Oppy, Paul Draper, Quentin Smith, J. L. Mackie, and J. L. Schellenberg.

Traditional religious definition of God

In modern Western societies, the concepts of God typically entail a monotheistic, supreme, ultimate, and personal being, as found in the Christian, Islamic and Jewish traditions. In monotheistic religions outside the Abrahamic traditions, the existence of God is discussed in similar terms. In these traditions, God is also identified as the author (either directly or by inspiration) of certain texts, or that certain texts describe specific historical events caused by the God in question or communications from God (whether in direct speech or via dreams or omens). Some traditions also believe that God is the entity which is currently answering prayers for intervention or information or opinions.

Moses ben Maimon, widely known as Maimonides, was a Jewish scholar who tried to logically prove the existence of God. Maimonides offered proofs for the existence of God, but he did not begin with defining God first, like many others do. Rather, he used the description of the earth and the universe to prove the existence of God. He talked about the Heavenly bodies and how they are committed to eternal motion. Maimonides argued that because every physical object is finite, it can only contain a finite amount of power. If everything in the universe, which includes all the planets and the stars, is finite, then there has to be an infinite power to push forth the motion of everything in the universe. Narrowing down to an infinite being, the only thing that can explain the motion is an infinite being (meaning God) which is neither a body nor a force in the body. Maimonides believed that this argument gives us a ground to believe that God is, not an idea of what God is. He believed that God cannot be understood or be compared.[10]

Non-personal definitions of God

Deism and panentheism assert that there is a God distinct from, or which extends beyond (either in time or in space or in some other way) the universe. These positions deny that God intervenes in the operation of the universe, including communicating with humans personally. The notion that God never intervenes or communicates with the universe, or may have evolved into the universe (as in pandeism), makes it difficult, if not by definition impossible, to distinguish between a universe with God and one without.

The Ethics of Baruch Spinoza gave two demonstrations of the existence of God.[11] The God of Spinoza is uncaused by any external force and has no free will, it is not personal and not anthropomorphic.

Debate about how theism should be argued

The argument that the existence of God can be known to all, even prior to exposure to any divine revelation, predates Christianity.[clarification needed] Paul the Apostle made this argument when he said 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".[13] In this, Paul alludes to the proofs for a creator, later enunciated by Thomas Aquinas[14] and others, that had also been explored by the Greek philosophers.

Another apologetical school of thought, including Dutch and American Reformed thinkers (such as Abraham Kuyper, Benjamin Warfield, and Herman Dooyeweerd), emerged in the late 1920s. This school was instituted by Cornelius Van Til, and came to be popularly called presuppositional apologetics (though Van Til felt "transcendental" would be a more accurate title). The main distinction between this approach and the more classical evidentialist approach 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 do not 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. They attempt to prove the existence of God by means of appeal to the transcendental necessity of the belief—indirectly (by appeal to the unavowed presuppositions of the non-believer's worldview) rather than directly (by appeal to some form of common factuality). In practice this school uses what have come to be known as transcendental arguments. These arguments 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.

Protestant Christians note that the Christian faith teaches "salvation is by faith",[15] and that faith is reliance upon the faithfulness of God. 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 its existence would become superfluous. Søren Kierkegaard argued that objective knowledge, such as 1+1=2, is unimportant to existence. If God could rationally be proven, his existence would be unimportant to humans.[citation needed] It is because God cannot rationally be proven that his existence is important to us. 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.

According to Christianity, Jesus is the Son of God as chronicled in the Bible's New Testament, and in most Christian denominations He is held to be God the Son, a prosopon (Person) of the Trinity of God.

Christians believe him to be the messiah, or a saviour (giving him the title Christ), who was prophesied in the Bible's Old Testament. Through Jesus's crucifixion and resurrection, Christians believe that God offers humans salvation and eternal life,[1] with Jesus's death atoning for all sin, thus making humanity right with God. The commonly held belief among Christians is the phrase, "Jesus died for your sins," and thus they accept that salvation is only possible through him.[2]

These teachings emphasize that as the Lamb of God, Jesus chose to suffer nailed to the cross at Calvary as a sign of his obedience to the will of God, as an "agent and servant of God".[3][4] Jesus's choice positions him as a man of obedience, in contrast to Adam's disobedience.[5] According to the New Testament, after God raised him from the dead,[6] Jesus ascended to heaven to sit at the right hand of God the Father,[7] with his followers awaiting his return to Earth and God's subsequent Last Judgment.[8]

According to the gospel accounts, Jesus was born of a virgin, instructed other Jews how to follow God (sometimes using parables), performed miracles and gathered disciples. Christians generally believe that this narrative is historically true.

While there has been theological debate over the nature of Jesus, Trinitarian Christians believe that Jesus is the Logos, God incarnate (God in human form), God the Son, and "true God and true man"—fully divine and fully human. Jesus, having become fully human in all respects, suffered the pains and temptations of a mortal man, yet he did not sin.