Existence of God (Peter Kreeft)

Peter Kreeft in Reasonableness of Christianity.

I believe the existence of God can be proved. I believe in fact that there are at least 25 distinct and probable, fairly decent arguments for something that could only be called God, at least to such an extent that an atheist would tremble a bit.I think that not much about the God revealed in the Bible can be proved, that certainly can put you down on the theistic rather than the atheistic side.Some of these arguments, it seems to me, are only clues, such as the arguments from authority or common consent. Some of them are practical, like Pascal's wager. But there are at least four good solid theoretical arguments, probably the four most common, which all appear to me to be valid.

First, the cosmological argument: the argument from causality in the cosmos (the contingency argument in other words); the argument towards an eternal and necessary self-existing being in order to ground the chain of contingent and not self-caused beings that we see around us.

Second, the moral argument: It has as its premise the absolute authority of conscience. If you agree that you should never, ever, under any circumstances, disobey your conscience, then the next question is why does it have such an absolute authority? If you don't admit that anyone else's will or feelings have absolute authority, why do yours? Perhaps they are not yours. Perhaps they are the voice of
God.

Third, the argument from design: that the order in the universe which makes it a cosmos rather than a chaos came about without a super-cosmic intelligence but just by chance seems immensely improbable. No one in his right mind would ever use probability or chance as an explanation even of something as simple as my Chevrolet Cavalier parked out here. But the universe is much more complicated than a Chevrolet.

And finally, the teleological argument: the argument for an end to the universe and to human life. This is the existential argument, that there must be a final cause or purpose or goal to our lives. If not, they are "full of sound and fury signifying nothing." This is basically parallel to the cosmological argument—an argument for God as Omega rather than Alpha.

The cosmological argument says in effect that if there are no first causes there can't be second causes. We see around us a chain of second causes, therefore there must have been a first cause.

The teleological argument says there must be a final end. If there were no final end, no summum bonum, no ultimate outcome and meaning and point and purpose to all of human life, then, if we knew that, we wouldn't be motivated to do anything because everything is a means to that end. You wouldn't lift your little finger or get out of bed in the morning unless you believed at least unconsciously that you were contributing to something that had worth in itself.