Existence of God

The existence of God is a subject of debate in the philosophy of religion and popular culture.If a man have failed to find any good reason for believing that there is a God, it is perfectly natural and rational that he should not believe that there is a God; and if so, he is an atheist, although he assume no superhuman knowledge, but merely the ordinary human power of judging of evidence. If he go farther, and, after an investigation into the nature and reach of human knowledge, ending in the conclusion that the existence of God is incapable of proof, cease to believe in it on the ground that he cannot know it to be true, he is an agnostic and also an atheist, an agnostic-atheist—an atheist because an agnostic.'Whatever is contained in a clear and distinct idea of a thing must be predicated of that thing; but a clear and distinct idea of an absolutely perfect Being contains the idea of actual existence; therefore since we have the idea of an absolutely perfect Being such a Being must really exist.I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. The existence of God is a subject of debate in the philosophy of religion and popular culture. A wide variety of arguments for and against the existence of God can be categorized as metaphysical, logical, empirical, or subjective. In philosophical terms, the question of the existence of God involves the disciplines of epistemology (the nature and scope of knowledge) and ontology (study of the nature of being, existence, or reality) and the theory of value (since some definitions of God include 'perfection'). The Western tradition of philosophical discussion of the existence of God began with Plato and Aristotle, who made arguments that would now be categorized as cosmological. Other arguments for the existence of God have been proposed by St. Anselm, who formulated the first ontological argument; Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and Thomas Aquinas, who presented their own versions of the cosmological argument (the kalam argument and the first way, respectively); René Descartes, who said that the existence of a benevolent God is logically necessary for the evidence of the senses to be meaningful. John Calvin argued for a sensus divinitatis, which gives each human a knowledge of God's existence. Philosophers who have provided arguments against the existence of God include Friedrich Nietzsche and Bertrand Russell. In modern culture, the question of God's existence has been discussed by scientists such as Stephen Hawking, Francis Collins, Lawrence M. Krauss, Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, John Lennox and Sam Harris, as well as philosophers including Richard Swinburne, Alvin Plantinga, William Lane Craig, Rebecca Goldstein, A. C. Grayling, Daniel Dennett, Edward Feser and David Bentley Hart. Scientists follow the scientific method, within which theories must be verifiable by physical experiment. The majority of prominent conceptions of God explicitly or effectively posit a being whose existence is not testable either by proof or disproof. Therefore the question of God's existence may lie outside the purview of modern science by definition. The Catholic Church maintains that knowledge of the existence of God is the 'natural light of human reason'. Fideists maintain that belief in God's existence may not be amenable to demonstration or refutation, but rests on faith alone. Atheists view arguments for the existence of God as insufficient, mistaken or outweighed by arguments against it, whereas some religions, such as Buddhism, are not concerned with the existence of gods at all and other religions, such as Jainism, reject the possibility of a creator deity. A common misconception is that theism is ancient while atheism is modern, but mankind has been making the same arguments for and against the existence of deities—including, with the rise of monotheism, God—since the dawn of human history. Bronze Age texts such as the Vedas present various arguments against the deities, such as the problem of evil and the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit, as well as arguments for the deities, such as argument from morality and Pascal's wager, without explaining the arguments themselves, implying that readers are familiar with them and that the arguments themselves were old by the Bronze Age. From the ancient Greeks to the medieval Japanese people to the Native Americans, the same arguments for and against deities have been found. Some atheists and theists see the antiquity of their beliefs as reinforcing them, while others believe arguing about God is trite and pointless. Positions on the existence of God can be divided along numerous axes, producing a variety of orthogonal classifications. Theism and atheism are positions of belief (or lack of it), while gnosticism and agnosticism are positions of knowledge (or the lack of it). Ignosticism concerns belief about God's conceptual coherence. Apatheism concerns belief about the practical importance of whether God exists. For the purposes of discussion, Richard Dawkins described seven 'milestones' on his spectrum of theistic probability: