Existence of God
For the purposes of discussion, Richard Dawkins described seven "milestones" on his spectrum of theistic probability:[5] The Catholic Church, following the teachings of Paul the Apostle (e.g., Romans 1:20), Thomas Aquinas, and the First Vatican Council, affirms that God's existence "can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason".
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.
For example, Ibn Rushd, a 12th-century Islamic scholar, philosopher, and physician, states there are only two arguments worthy of adherence, both of which are found in what he calls the "Precious Book" (The Qur'an).
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.
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.
John Polkinghorne suggests that the nearest analogy to the existence of God in physics is the ideas of quantum mechanics which are seemingly paradoxical but make sense of a great deal of disparate data.
However, since an assessment of the weight of evidence depends on the prior probability that is assigned to each worldview, arguments that a theist finds convincing may seem thin to an atheist and vice versa.
[38][39] Aquinas did not intend to fully prove the existence of God as he is orthodoxly conceived (with all of his traditional attributes), but proposed his Five Ways as a first stage, which he built upon later in his work.
[65] Plantinga did not claim to have shown that the conclusion of the logical problem is wrong, nor did he assert that God's reason for allowing evil is, in fact, to preserve free will.
[67][68][69][70] Contemporary atheologians[71] have presented arguments claiming to have found the additional premises needed to create an explicitly contradictory theistic set by adding to the propositions 1–4.
Furthermore, through a series of arguments, he derived that the necessary existent must have attributes that he identified with God in Islam, including unity, simplicity, immateriality, intellect, power, generosity, and goodness.
Both movements have used the teleological argument to argue against the modern scientific understanding of evolution, and to claim that supernatural explanations should be given equal validity in the public school science curriculum.
[91] Human subjects in scientific studies have reported that psychedelic drugs such as LSD, mescaline, psilocybin mushrooms, and DMT provide perceptions of a transcendent reality, including encounters with God.
The argument from sensus divinitatis (Latin for 'sense of divinity') posits that humans are born with an innate sense, or cognitive mechanism, that grants them awareness of God's presence.
[94] Research in the cognitive science of religion suggests that the human brain has a natural and evolutionary predisposition towards theistic beliefs, which Kelly James Clark argues is empirical evidence for the presence of a sensus divinitatis.
[95] Philosopher Stephen Toulmin is notable for his work in the history of ideas[96] that features the (rational) warrant: a statement that connects the premises to a conclusion.
[98] Hinman uses a wide range of studies, including ones by Robert Wuthnow, Andrew Greeley, Mathes and Kathleen Nobel to establish that mystical experiences are life-transformative in a way that is significant, positive and lasting.
In contrast, the theistic anti-realist has a straightforward explanation: the world reflects a complex mathematical structure because it was created by God following an abstract model.
In his book Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis argued that "conscience reveals to us a moral law whose source cannot be found in the natural world, thus pointing to a supernatural Lawgiver.
In a commentary to Brahma Sutras (III, 2, 38, and 41), Adi Sankara argues that the original karmic actions themselves cannot bring about the proper results at some future time; neither can super sensuous, non-intelligent qualities like adrsta by themselves mediate the appropriate, justly deserved pleasure and pain.
The existence of natural disasters, diseases, wars, crimes, and other forms of suffering seems to contradict the idea of a loving and compassionate God.
[164] Similarly, Friedrich Nietzsche argues in his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra that human existence is meaningless because there is no inherent purpose or meaning to life.
The argument from naturalism can be traced to ancient Greek philosophy, where philosophers such as Democritus and Epicurus argued that the universe was composed of atoms and void, with no need for supernatural explanations.
During this time, philosophers such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant argued that knowledge could only be derived from empirical observation and rational analysis, without recourse to supernatural explanations.
The argument is based on the idea that the theory of evolution provides a natural explanation for the diversity of life on Earth, and therefore, there is no need to invoke a divine creator.
Without objective criteria for verifying or falsifying religious experiences, they remain purely subjective and cannot be used as evidence in any rational debate about the existence of God.
Sigmund Freud stressed fear and pain, the need for a powerful parental figure, the obsessional nature of ritual, and the hypnotic state a community can induce as contributing factors to the psychology of religion.
Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained (2002), based in part on his anthropological field work, treats belief in God as the result of the brain's tendency towards agency detection.
Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002) makes a similar argument and adds examination of the socially coordinating aspects of shared belief.
Tremlin contends that an agency detection device (ADD) and a theory of mind module (ToMM) lead humans to suspect an agent behind every event.
