Does_God_Exist_

David Newey V00689259 Does God Exist' The standard definition given to God is a being that is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. To provide insight on whether a being of this nature exists or does not exist requires scrutiny of what reasons or evidence is there for accepting the existence of God as true or false and whether the conditions stated are plausible. Once common arguments for the existence of God are evaluated, the aim will be to show the existence of God is unprovable and that it is reasonable to conclude that God does not exist. Firstly, a common attempt to prove God’s existence is the argument of intelligent design. In this argument, the claim is that the universe is orderly and structured in its appearance resembling a machine-like configuration. The best explanation for this is that there was a designer behind it, and only God would have the capability to design something with such complexity. This argument relies on something that is orderly and structured arising from an intelligent mind. However, it is perfectly understandable to think that order could appear at random, even if the possibility of it happening is nearly impossible. The fact is that if it isn’t totally impossible it still has the capability to obtain. Also, sciences such as biology and physics are just as capable of explaining order as an intelligent designer is. It is so that these sciences are not completely conclusive, yet that does not refute their potential to provide a reasonable explanation to the appearance of orderly structure. Furthermore, the argument states that an intelligent designer is required to build or create machine-like structure. However, since this argument relies on the universe being equivalent in complexity to a machine, complicated machinery often requires many minds to bring such complexity to it. The construction of a car does not rely solely on one mind, but rather many minds working together to build it. In turn, it would follow that under these conditions the most logical explanation is that the universe was created by many Gods, not just one. Therefore, there is sufficient reason to doubt the claim made by this argument making it futile at proving God’s existence. Another common argument attempting to prove the existence of God is the one of cause and effect and goes as follows. In nature we see that every event has an cause; therefore, there must have been an initial cause to get the universe to unfold as so. The initial cause is God. This argument does not add any conclusiveness, but rather just pushes the question further for one could ask what caused God to exist' A typical reply to this is that God does not apply to the cause and effect law stated and exists just because. It seems hard to argue this but one could easily imagine that some matter just exists too; and that it does not apply to the cause and effect rule but exists just because. There is no reason to conclude that God is the only thing possible of this exemption making the argument fall short at proving God’s existence. Maybe some very simple piece or pieces of matter just existed resulting in the chain of events leading to the whole universe being created. If God can have no cause, than it’s just as logical an assumption to think other things could possibly have no cause as well. The last common argument, appearing in various ways, for God’s existence goes as follows. Since God possesses the quality of omnibenevolence, everything in the Bible ,or any other monotheistic scripture, can be taken as true for the Bible is the word of God and , therefore, it has to be true. This argument is very poor because it uses a premise, God being maximally good, to support a premise, why the Bible should be taken as true, rather than the conclusion, that everything in the Bible is true. This argument has still not given credit to believe that the statements in the Bible are actually true, just that if the Bible were to be true, then everything in the Bible would be true because God is maximally good. This is commonly known as circular reasoning; in turn, these types of arguments get nowhere in providing sufficient reason to believe in the existence of God. A further more problematic consideration countering the existence of God is the problem of evil. The problem arises when considering God’s omnibenevolence and the appearance of evil in the world. In theory, since God is the creator of everything and is also all knowing and all powerful, he has to know the concept of evil and let it arise in the world. Following, it is a contradiction to say that God is maximally good, because he would not let suffering and wrong doings in the world. Under this definition of God, evil should not exist. A rebuttal to this statement is God gave humans the choice to act freely. Therefore, the problem of evil was generated by the quality of freedom of choice that god applied to humans. However, this remark would undermine God’s omniscient quality because all-knowing should include knowing the future, or this would become a limit to it. In turn, by knowing the future evils that giving human’s free will would result in would still fall short of being maximally good. Therefore, a God that is omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient cannot logically exist. I would be ignorant to think that someone could not refute and argue this further, but the questions raised leave the existence of God largely unprovable. The current arguments made for God existence are not infallible, yet there is still no definitive evidence ruling out his existence either. With that being said, I argue that it is logical to accept that God does not exist until evidence to the contrary is provided. Since there is not a sufficient reason to believe that God exists, it would be more intellectually correct to take this proposition as false. References Conee, E. & Sider, T. (2005). Riddles of Existence: A Guided tour of Metaphysics. Zimmerman, D. & van Inwagen, P. (2008). Metaphysics: the big questions.