Descartes’s answer is no: “it is manifest by the natural light that all fraud and deception depend on some defect.” Proof that God is not a deceiver: 1) From the supreme being only being may flow (nonbeing – nothingness – neither needs nor can have a cause).

They are called Cartesian because the idea was developed by the mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes who was also known as Cartesius. He is also famous for saying “I think, therefore I am”.

“I think; therefore I am” was the end of the search Descartes conducted for a statement that could not be doubted. He found that he could not doubt that he himself existed, as he was the one doing the doubting in the first place. In Latin (the language in which Descartes wrote), the phrase is “Cogito, ergo sum.”

Augustine believes reason to be a uniquely human cognitive capacity that comprehends deductive truths and logical necessity. Additionally, Augustine adopts a subjective view of time and says that time is nothing in reality but exists only in the human mind’s apprehension of reality.

There is certainly no shortage of arguments that purport to establish God’s existence, but ‘Arguments for the existence of God’ focuses on three of the most influential arguments: the cosmological argument, the design argument, and the argument from religious experience.

Much of the discussion has focused on Kant’s “big three” arguments: ontological arguments, cosmological arguments, and teleological arguments.

In Aquinas’s system, God is that paramount perfection. Aquinas’s fifth and final way to demonstrate God’s existence is an argument from final causes, or ends, in nature (see teleology). Again, he drew upon Aristotle, who held that each thing has its own natural purpose or end.

As an “a priori” argument, the Ontological Argument tries to “prove” the existence of God by establishing the necessity of God’s existence through an explanation of the concept of existence or necessary being . Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury first set forth the Ontological Argument in the eleventh century.

Edmund Husserl

In the end, the Ontological Argument fails as a proof for the existence of God when careful attention is paid to the cognitive terms that it employs. When the terms are disambiguated, either nothing philosophically interesting follows or nothing follows at all.

Perhaps the best known criticisms of ontological arguments are due to Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason. Most famously, Kant claims that ontological arguments are vitiated by their reliance upon the implicit assumption that “existence” is a real predicate.

Because we cannot experience God through experience, Kant argues that it is impossible to know how we would verify God’s existence. This is in contrast to material concepts, which can be verified by means of the senses.

The basic premise, of all teleological arguments for the existence of God, is that the world exhibits an intelligent purpose based on experience from nature such as its order, unity, coherency, design and complexity.

The teleological argument (from τέλος, telos, ‘end, aim, goal’; also known as physico-theological argument, argument from design, or intelligent design argument) is an argument for the existence of God or, more generally, that complex functionality in the natural world which looks designed is evidence of an intelligent …

In The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins crafts an elegant riposte to show that the complex process of Darwinian natural selection is unconscious and automatic. If natural selection can be said to play the role of a watchmaker in nature, it is a blind one—working without foresight or purpose.

Teleological ethics, (teleological from Greek telos, “end”; logos, “science”), theory of morality that derives duty or moral obligation from what is good or desirable as an end to be achieved.

The first cause argument is based around cause and effect. Aquinas stated that this cause (which is outside our world) is the first cause – that is, the one that started everything. Aquinas argued that this first cause must have no beginning – that is, nothing caused it to exist because the first cause is eternal.

Summary. Descartes’ cosmological (or causal) arguments for the existence of God are often thought to be among the least plausible aspects of his philosophy and, perhaps as a result, have been relatively neglected by commentators.

AQUINAS’ FOURTH WAY. predicated in relation to a “most,” and goodness, truth, nobility, and being are all susceptible of comparison in things. The second step is the argument that whatever is in the genus of being, goodness, or any other perfection, is caused by whatever is maximum in that genus.

Scientists don’t try to prove or disprove God’s existence because they know there isn’t an experiment that can ever detect God. And if you believe in God, it doesn’t matter what scientists discover about the Universe – any cosmos can be thought of as being consistent with God.

Meyer is a Christian, but atheists, and theists who believe God never intervenes in the natural world, will be instructed by his careful presentation of this fiendishly difficult problem.”