The existence of God.Name
Course
Tutor
Date
Since the birth of mankind, the biggest question in our minds is why? Where did we come from? What is the origin of our existence? And all along since we were born we have learnt from our church, school teachers, from our parents that one Supreme Being of higher stature put us here, God. As a philosopher it is not satisfactory to just accept without wanting to know where He came from or does He exist. So we will ask ourselves “is it possible to prove His existence?” We will try and answer that question in the discussion below.
Three philosophers, Rene Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Aquinas, came up with arguments to prove and criticize that God exists (Philip, 1963). In the process three arguments about the proof that God exists developed; the Teleological, Cosmological, and Ontological arguments. The most sophisticated and most difficult of the three arguments is the Ontological argument. Descartes argued that it is not logical to think about something if it does not exist “it is hard for me to conceive about God if He does not exist hence existence is inseparable from Him.” He continues to argue that something exists from something else, nothing comes from nowhere even mankind; hence there must exist a perfect, omnipotent, and Supreme Being who is God (Robert, 2005). The argument supports the existence of God through the belief that for the existence of mankind there must be a being above us who is greater than us from whom we came from. Ontological argument is mainly based on faith but has no actual physical evidence to support its content.
Immanuel Kant criticized the ontological argument and he stated that unlike the Descartes argument, he thought that God does not exist because He has to but because He does exist. One of his proofs was that there simply needs to exist a supreme being who is either part or the cause of the world. The other proofs that he developed were; everything in the world is in motion and that every sort of motion begins from one particular point which is why God does exist. His other proof was that there is a cause for everything and this has to be initiated by one being but He is not a receiver of cause. Things in life are both possible and impossible but they both do exist, at one point everything was nothing but every necessary thing requires to be created and that creator is God (Dick, 1985).
That was the cosmological argument; the third argument was the teleological argument that simply explains the law of nature that states, everything and everyone has a purpose, everything that happens has a reason and that purpose is put in us by God. Descartes tries to provide evidence that God does exist, the most important form of evidence is that human beings cannot reach perfection for they are finite beings but for an infinite being (God) perfection is present. If human beings could be perfect, they would have the ability to create God in themselves but they have not been able to. This evidence has been supported by another form of evidence in which he asks where man came from and gives the answer that we came from God.
These are the three arguments that have been developed by faith and through logical evidence explaining that it is possible to proof that God does exist.
References
Dick Howard, (1985). “From Marx to Kant” Albany: State University of New York.
Philip Wheelwright, (1963). “Five Philosopher” New York: The Odyssey Press Inc.
Robert Solomon, (2005). “Introducing Philosophy” New York: Oxford University Press Inc.
