existence of God, in religion, the proposition that there is a supreme supernatural or preternatural being that is the creator or sustainer or ruler of the universe and all things in it, including human beings. In many religions God is also conceived as perfect and unfathomable by humans, as all-powerful and all-knowing (omnipotent and omniscient), and as the source and ultimate ground of morality.
Belief in the existence of God (or gods) is definitional of theism and characteristic of many (though not all) religious traditions. For much of its history, Christianity in particular has been concerned with the question of whether God’s existence can be established rationally (i.e., by reason alone or by reason informed by sense experience) or through religious experience or revelation or instead must be accepted as a matter of faith. The remainder of this article will consider some historically influential arguments that have been advanced to demonstrate the existence of God.
READ MORE ON THIS TOPICtheism: Intellectual background…many attempts to establish the existence of one supreme and ultimate Being—whom in religion one speaks of as God—and some of these have…
Arguments for the existence of God are usually classified as either a priori or a posteriori—that is, based on the idea of God itself or based on experience. An example of the latter is the cosmological argument, which appeals to the notion of causation to conclude either that there is a first cause or that there is a necessary being from whom all contingent beings derive their existence.
Other versions of this approach include the appeal to contingency—to the fact that whatever exists might not have existed and therefore calls for explanation—and the appeal to the principle of sufficient reason, which claims that for anything that exists there must be a sufficient reason why it exists. The arguments by St. Thomas Aquinas known as the Five Ways—the argument from motion, from efficient causation
from contingency, from degrees of perfection, and from final causes or ends in nature—are generally regarded as cosmological. Something must be the first or prime mover, the first efficient cause, the necessary ground of contingent beings,
the supreme perfection that imperfect beings approach, and the intelligent guide of natural things toward their ends. This, Aquinas said, is God. The most common criticism of the cosmological argument has been that the phenomenon that God’s existence supposedly accounts for does not in fact need to be explained.
