Can The Existence of God be Proven?
Can The Existence of God be Proven?
If so how.
If it can't be proven why?
Arguments for the existence of God come in many different forms; some draw on history, some on science, some on personal experience, and some on philosophy. The primary focus of this site is the philosophical arguments—the ontological argument, the first cause argument, the argument from design, and the moral argument.
Each of these arguments, if successful, supports a certain conception of God, and so supports each of the various religions to the extent that its conception of God matches that supported by the argument.
Some proofs God does exist.
knowing what “God” means makes it obvious that God’s non-existence is impossible.
Another part of what “God” mean is “perfect”; something can’t properly be called God unless it is perfect. This is the key idea behind the ontological argument.
If something is perfect, then it couldn’t possibly be better than it is; there can’t be anything better than perfection. This means that if a thing is perfect then it is impossible to imagine it being better than it is; there is nothing better than it is to imagine.
The universe consists of a series of events stretched across time in a long causal chain. Each one of these events is the cause of the event that comes after it, and the effect of the event that comes before it. The world as it is came from the world as it was, which came from the world as it was before.
If we trace this series of events back in time, then what do we find? There seem, at first glance, to be two possibilities: either we eventually reach the first event in the series, the cause at the beginning of the universe that set everything going, or there is no first event in the series and the past stretches back into infinity. The first cause argument tells us that the second of these is not possible, that the past cannot stretch back into infinity but rather must have a beginning. The argument then proceeds by suggesting that if the universe has a beginning then there must be something outside it that brought it into existence. This being outside the universe, this Creator, the first cause argument tells us, is God.
If I told you that I had just counted down from infinity to zero, starting with “infinity minus zero” and carrying on until I reached “infinite minus infinity, i.e zero”, then you would know that this claim is false. Just as it is impossible to count up from zero to infinity, so it is impossible to count down from infinity to zero. If I had started counting down from infinity and kept going, then I would still be counting to this day; I would not have finished. My claim to have counted down from infinity to zero must be false.
The idea that the universe has an infinite past is just as problematic as the idea that I have just counted down from infinity. If the universe had an infinite past, then time would have had to count down from infinity to reach time zero, the present, and so would not have reached it. The fact that we have reached the present therefore shows that the past is not infinite but finite. The universe has a beginning. This claim, of course, has been confirmed by modern science, who trace the universe back to a point of origin in the ‘big bang’.
http://www.existence-of-god.com/
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Originally Posted by Newgrange
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