Rene Descartes came up with a singularly abiding truth in the famous “I think, therefore I am.” No matter how delusional one’s thought processes might be, it is undeniable that for the thought to have occurred, the thinker must exist.
That bulletproof thought seems to be what he built upon to produce the Cartesian proof of God’s existence.
I saw this years ago, and may be simplifying quite too much; if so, correct me (I know I can trust you, SDMB).
1 God is by definition omnipotent
2 If any entity is omnipotent it has the will and the ability to exist
3 If an entity fails to exist it cannot be omnipotent
4 Therefore, God exists
Kinda begs whose doing the defining, but…
It doesn’t really do it for me.
I once heard an interesting analogy on a radio show that purported to scientifically prove that there is some sort of afterlife. Please forgive me if the science isn’t correct (it was my worst subject), but here goes:
Imagine driving in a car 100 mph. All of the sudden, you have to brake. When you stop the car, the brakepad (or whatever it’s called) that stops the wheels from turning “absorbs” the energy produced by the wheels. Consequently, the brakepad turns hot, because physics tells us that you can’t destroy matter or energy.
Now consider that you’re living, and you possess energy. When you die, what happens to this energy since it can’t be eliminated? The theory is this energy is transferred to your soul the same way the energy in the car was transferred to the brakepad. The soul then lives on after the body dies.
I’m sure there’s some questionable science here that one of you will point out. But I thought I’d put this out here for public consumption.
“I never lie, but I don’t always say what I’m thinking.”
My father was what you might call an intellectual agnostic. He couldn’t accept the existence of God because there was no way to prove it.
However, whenever someone asked him why he didn’t just call himself an atheist, he always replied “Because I simply can not accept that the universe was created by a random act.”
Don’t look to Cecil for proof, we’re all going to have to figure it out for ourselves.
These all believe in the same God (except possibly the Mormons, who have some obscure ideas about which I have seen conflicting claims).
I’m not familiar with Descartes, so cannot speak to the authenticity of the above, but it’s a rather weak (to my mind) riff on Anselm of Canterbury’s ontological argument that: That than which a greater cannot possibly be conceived must exist, and cannot even be thought of as not existing.
But this gets into PhD-level questions of logic and language, so let’s not go there.
For me, the most important line of argument is more or less as follows:
We’re all scumbags.
But we also all know better.
Ergo, there’s Something Out There.
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
There is a specific refutation of Descartes’ argument for the existence of God, though I haven’t had time to look it up. As for “I think, therefore I am”, Jean-Paul Sartre observed that this proposition asserts only the existence of the thinker, and not an identity between the thinker and the subject perceiving the thought. In other words, it presupposes an object called a thinker, which is a necessary and sufficient condition for a thought to exist; it doesn’t prove, however, that the subject of the thought exists. His point, IIRC, was that proofs of language dependency are not metaphysically sufficient - one’s conscious existence is simply self-evident, and presupposes nothing.
Never attribute to an -ism anything more easily explained by common, human stupidity.
My dictionary has it written in lower case! Get a clue folks :-):
1god "gad also "god\ noun [ME, fr. OE; akin to OHG got god] (bef. 12c)
1 cap : the supreme or ultimate reality: as
a : the Being perfect in power, wisdom, and goodness who is worshipped as creator and ruler of the universe
b Christian Science : the incorporeal divine Principle ruling over all as eternal Spirit : infinite Mind
2 : a being or object believed to have more than natural attributes and powers and to require human worship; specif : one controlling a particular aspect or part of reality
3 : a person or thing of supreme value
4 : a powerful ruler
“Nonsense does not cease to be nonsense merely because someone chooses to prefix the words, ‘God can,’ to it.”
– C. S. Lewis
As to lower-case, that depends, as always in the English language, on whether one is discussing a god or referring to the god. “Bill Clinton is the father of Chelsea,” but, “I shall have to speak to Father about this.”
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams