Ch. 5 The Quest (continued)
Arguments for God’s Existence
Issues: St. Anselm's ontological argument was that since we can imagine a perfect God, God must exist because existence would be a quality of perfection. Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas logically pursued God back to the beginning of a contingent cause and effect series as the Great Unmoved Mover or First Cause in a cosmological argument. Aquinas also developed one of the first formulations of the teleological argument which claimed that the magnificence of the design of the universe implied the existence of a Great Designer. The divine encounter argument cited people who claimed to have had direct communication with God as evidence that God, then, must really exist.
My Take: I found the ontological argument to be very weak. I had imagined a perfect man but my imagining him did not make him exist even though existence would have been an aspect of his perfection. St. Thomas Aquinas, too, was not convinced by St. Anslem's argument and for far more sophisticated reasons than mine. The cosmological argument did make sense to me but I also conceded that it would not be persuasive to someone who believed that existence was eternal with no original cause. The teleological argument had appeal to me in moments of reverie gazing at the stars or losing myself in the ocean; but, not so much when I watched victims of natural disasters struggle on the nightly news or animals eat each other on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. My problem with the divine encounter argument was that not everyone had a direct experience of God and those who did were experiencing something subjective and not open to verification. While many people who claimed to have experienced a direct encounter with God described a similar experience, not all such people did. I, personally, believed that I had experienced direct encounters with God but so did many of the patients with schizophrenia in the mental health facility where I interned while in college. Purely subjective experiences did not provide the objective common ground necessary for conversation and I did not believe that it would be God's will for us to be stuck in our private worlds unable to communicate effectively about God. Did God exist? I thought the short answer was that God's existence could not be proven definitively by logical argument. I also thought that God's existence could not be disproven definitively by logical argument though some interpretations of God certainly could be proven illogical.
