There are many "proofs" of God's existence that have been written. Taken alone, they may be unconvincing. However, when you consider all of them together, you come up with a strong case for God's existence.

The first argument we will use is called the Ontological Argument. This was first proposed by St. Anselm in the Proslogium and was later popularized by Descartes in his Meditations. It goes something like this:

There are basically three types of things in the world: Those that do in fact exist (like the computer you are using to view this), those that could exist but don't (like unicorns), and those that could not exist (like a four-sided triangle).
Imagine something that is greater than everything else, and call it "God". Or, to phrase it another way, God is something which you cannot imagine anything greater than. However, if God could exist but doesn't, then God could not be greater than everything else, because a God that could exist and does exist is greater than a God that could exist and doesn't. So the greatest being in the world ("God") must be something that could exist and actually does exist, if it is truly the greatest.

This sounds like a lot of philosophical rambling, but the point is still there. The greatest being in the universe by definition must exist, or it cannot be the greatest being in the universe.
However, by the common definition, God is more than just the "greatest being in the universe".

Next is the Cosmological Argument first described by St. Thomas Aquinas, and was later expanded upon by others. It can be summed up as follows:

Every event and every creature is dependent on something else: children come from their parents, the earth is what it is today partly because of what it was yesterday, the solar system came from a cloud of dust and gas, etc. So what if you follow the chain of events all the way back to the beginning? What is the initial cause? Well, obviously the initial cause must be something that is responsible for its own existence. This is one of the characteristics of God. So this self-existent being is God. Therefore, God exists.
Later, people asked what if there is an infinite series of events? Then there is no first cause. But the response is: what caused this particular infinite chain to exist, versus some other infinite chain, or even a finite chain? Or what caused there to be a chain at all? Whatever caused this chain must be self-existent, since it could not be caused by something in the chain. And it must exist outside of the chain. This is God.

This describes God as the Creator of the universe, and as a being that has always existed.

Finally is the Teleological Argument, or the "Argument from Design". Perhaps the most famous version of this is from William Paley, often referred to as "The Watchmaker":

If you stumbled upon a watch out in the forest, even if you'd never seen a watch before, you would conclude that it was made by an intelligent creator. It's too complex to have been created solely by chance.
The universe is just as complex, if not more complex, than a watch. It is too complex to have been created solely by chance. Therefore, the universe must have been designed by an intelligent Designer. In fact, given the size of the universe and the complexity of the universe and of mankind itself, the Designer must've been very powerful and very intelligent indeed, Someone we would recognize as God.

Again, this describes God as Creator and Designer of the universe, an all-powerful and extremely intelligent Being who created the universe with purpose and intention.

Each of these arguments is only a piece of the puzzle, and each one points to the existence of an all-powerful Being who created the universe and cares for the universe. While each one has its faults, when taken as a whole, it's pretty compelling.

There is one major argument against the existence of God, apart from the objections to these arguments. This is covered in my next paper -- The Problem of Evil.

Page last updated Wednesday, September 21, 2005.