User:Larry Sanger/Larry's Text/Traditionally respectable arguments for the existence of God



Next we will look at three venerable, traditional arguments for the existence of God. Some people call these "proofs" of the existence of God. You can call them "proofs" if you like, just don?t think that using that word, "proof," will magically transform them into knock-down drag-out excellent arguments. You should examine them on their merits and see if they really are proofs properly so-called; look and see whether they do prove what they are supposed to prove.

And before I turn to those three arguments, I should add that there are other arguments that have been offered for the existence of God, which I am not mentioning. Not because I think they're no good, but because we don't have time to explain and evaluate them properly. In fact, we are going to have to go pretty quickly through those arguments that we do examine. Anyway, though, you can find some of those arguments that I am not going to go over on pp. 436-55 of the Hospers selection. And you can find more sympathetic presentations of those same arguments in any number of textbooks about philosophy and about the philosophy of religion in particular.

The three arguments I'm going to present are the ontological argument, the cosmological argument, and the teleological argument.


 * The ontological argument


 * The cosmological argument


 * The teleological argument

/Talk