This is just a simple brush through of the most commonly used arguments for God’s existence. The descriptions here are as basic and simple as I could make them and each of these areguements are way deeper and more complex than appears here.
Every human mind is different. We each understand certain things better than other things. The purpose of this list is for you to see which one sparks interest in your mind. You can use this list as a diving board as you delve deeper into the studies surrounding whichever thought process appeals the most to you.
The Cosmological Argument
Something must have caused everything else.
Everything that happens has a cause and that thing has a cause and that thing has a cause—>does this go on forever?
It’s not possible for this to go on forever. At some point there needs to be a first cause of everything else, there needs to be an unmoved mover, an uncaused causer, an unchanged changer.
William Blake ”The Ancient of Days”
This uncaused, causer needs to be:
Eternal because if it ever stops or starts existing that’s change and it can’t do that.
Outside the universe because everything inside the universe is caused.
All-powerful because if it can’t be moved but it can move everything else then it is all-powerful.
This is what we would call God.
Another way to explain this idea goes as follows:
In Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy, act and potency are terms that describe the relationship between being and change:
Everything is a mixture of “act” (meaning what it is) and potency (meaning what it could be).
Act: What a thing is in the present moment.
Potency: What a thing could potentially be.
For example, an oak tree's act is its color, density, branches, and it has the potential (potency) to become a table, firewood, or a child's toy.
So if you eat an apple you are actualizing its potency to be eaten, but you also are a mixture of act and potency. For example you have the potential to be strong but you’re not, every time something changes you it’s actualizing a potency in you.
Anytime a change happens you have one thing actualizing another, but if you follow all the actualizing events back in time, you either have to go back for eternity, never stopping, or you will have to eventually come across an unactualized actualizer. That’s what we call God.
God is a being that is pure Act, meaning He already is everything He could be. So, He has to be eternal because if He is not then He has the potential to not exist, but there is no potential in God, so He has to have always existed.
Also, if God is already everything He could be then no one can do anything to Him because that would cause Him to change, so He has to be all-powerful, making it impossible for anyone to do anything to Him.
The Moral Argument
This argument claims that God's transcendent character is the source of morals.
People often disagree on what is right and what is wrong (i.e. abortion, cannibalism, the death penalty, etc.). Everyone thinks they have the moral high ground. But, for the moral high ground to even exist—in order for there to be an answer to these disagreements—an ultimate right and a wrong—there has to be something outside of us all—something above us, greater than us—some sort of higher power determining what is right and wrong (a moral lawgiver determining objective morality).
This higher power is God.
Good and Bad (objective morality) are real. When people are honest with themselves, at the core of our being we know there is a right and a wrong (otherwise it’s might makes right, or survival of the fittest and we would have no right to tell anyone they are wrong for anything they do).
For right and wrong to exist, a higher power declaring what they are has to exist.
That higher power is what people consider to be God. So, therefore, God is real.
Teleological
Stuff in the universe seems to have a purpose so that means the universe must have had a designer.
If you found a machine lying around you would assume that someone designed the machine.
The universe works like a machine so somebody must have designed the universe.
Things in nature, like the human cell or the ecosystem of the world, are very complex and they work like a machine.
Darwinian evolution can claim to try to explain why that is, but there are other things it definitely can’t explain like the four constants of the universe:
Gravitational Constant
Electron Charge
Strong Nuclear Force
Weak Nuclear Force
These are perfectly fine-tuned–if there were even the slightest bit of difference the universe would immediately collapse in on itself. The way evolution works is these all would have had to build to perfection with time and random mutations. But, the reality is if any of these universal constants existed alone or at a slightly different state than they are, nothing would exist at all. They had to come into existence fully formed and functional in just the right way at just the right time.
This is the argument of “Irreducible Complexity” which states that things cannot exist at a less complex state.
Evolution requires things to have existed at a less complex state. So, evolution cannot be true and things had to be created complete in all their complexity. This argument works on smaller scales as well with things like animals, the human eye, or even human cells.
Transcendental
Without God nothing can make sense at all. God's unchanging nature is the foundation for the laws of logic, which are necessary for deductive reasoning.
There are a lot of things we assume but can’t prove scientifically, some of these things are necessary conditions for knowledge and experience.
For example, there are basic assumptions we need to make to do science:
Logic works
There’s consistency in the natural world
Truth exists
We can’t prove these things scientifically and yet we need them to be true to do any science.
These things all make sense if we presuppose a worldview where God exists, because we can say these things are set up by God.
If God doesn’t exist then we have no justification for the things we assume, it would be impossible to prove anything because universal laws cannot be justified or accounted for in an atheistic world, and everything just collapses.
Ontological
God exists because of the way He is. If you can imagine the ideal of something, it must exist.
God is defined as “that of which nothing greater can be conceived”. That means God must be:
All-powerful–because it’s greater than having limited power
All-knowing–because it’s greater than having limited knowledge
All-good–because it’s greater than being flawed
Exist–because existing is greater than not existing
Let’s take a look at how this is described by princeton.edu:
(1) Suppose that God exists in the understanding alone (people understand that the concept of an all-powerful God exists but they don’t believe He actually exists).
(2) Given our definition, this means that a being than which none greater can be conceived exists in the understanding alone.
(3) But this being can be conceived to exist in reality. That is, we can conceive of a circumstance in which theism is true, even if we do not believe that it actually obtains.
(4) But it is greater for a thing to exist in reality than for it to exist in the understanding alone.
(5) Hence we seem forced to conclude that a being than which none greater can be conceived can be conceived to be greater than it is.
(6) But that is absurd.
(7) So (1) must be false. God must exist in reality as well as in the understanding.
This reading of the argument is amply confirmed by the final paragraph:
Therefore, if that than which nothing greater can be conceived exists in the understanding alone, the very being than which nothing greater can be conceived is one than which a greater can be conceived. But obviously this is impossible. Hence there is no doubt that there exists a being than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality.
Mind/Consciousness
This isn’t exactly an argument for God but it is an argument for the human soul because it says you need something immaterial to explain consciousness.
Consciousness cannot be explained by the natural world.
The atheist explanation of consciousness is that our brain is a very advanced biological machine, but unlike our minds, machines can be reduced to their parts. Our brain can be reduced to its brain cells but that’s not the same as our experiences of consciousness. For example: you could find the part of our brain that sees the color yellow but that’s not the same as the experience of seeing yellowness.
You cannot study consciousness scientifically because one can only observe one’s own consciousness. For example there is no way to know if we all see the same colors.
A single atom is not conscious. Two atoms are not conscious. A bunch of atoms are not conscious. So even if you have a complex system, it’s still just a complex arrangement of atoms which aren't conscious.
So where does consciousness come from? It has to be supernatural.
Personal Experience
I’ve seen God do something so I believe He exists.
“The Hand of God” by Yongsung Kim
Supernatural Experiences
Answered Prayers
“Coincidences”
These types of arguments are good for convincing oneself, but not good for convincing other people. There are exceptions to this, however. For example: if someone really trusts you as a friend/mentor/parent, then your opinion and experiences may actually mean more to them than anything else. But, even if you open the door to their relationship with God by using your personal experiences, you shouldn’t leave them with only that. They will need to start building their own personal foundation of knowledge about why they believe in God as well in order for them to continue standing strong in the future.
Don’t underestimate the importance of this in your own life. Keeping track of the ways you know God has helped you in your life gives you a solid foundation to fall back on when life gets hard.
Pascal’s Wager
(more of a thought experiment than an argument)
This is the idea that if you’re going to “gamble” on your eternity, choosing to believe in God is the better/safer bet.
If you’re an atheist and atheism turns out to be correct, then you don’t really gain or lose anything.
If you’re an atheist and atheism turns out to be wrong, then you may lose everything for all eternity.
If you believe in God and it turns out atheism is correct, then you still don’t gain or lose anything.
If you believe in God and God is real, then you could gain everything for all eternity.
So, between these two possibilities, which one do you want to bet on?
The worst case scenario for a theist is that nothing happens to them in the end, while the worst case scenario for the atheist is that they suffer punishment for all eternity. Meanwhile, the best case scenario for the theist is that they exist in paradise for all eternity, while the best case scenario for the atheist is that nothing happens to them.
Believing in God gives you a much better chance at getting the best outcome while avoiding the worst outcome, so it is better for you to believe in God.
Math
There’s an infinite reality higher than our physical universe which determined how our physical universe functions and math is one of those set functions.
(This is a combination of the Intelligent Design argument, the Irreducible Complexity argument, and the “supernatural things we can’t explain naturally” argument.)
There’s basic math which isn’t all that special.
For example the number 5 corresponds to five kittens and five times two correspond to two groups of five kittens.
Then there’s advanced math and the more you get into advanced math the more it starts to get disconnected from our physical world. And, yet, it still works.
For example: there’s real numbers which correspond to real things, but there are also imaginary numbers that are just as mathematically real but don’t correspond to the real world. But they still exist mathematically even though they don’t exist in the real world.
Let’s look at two specific equations which are argued to be proof of God’s existence:
1) Euler’s Identity:
5 Most Important Numbers in Mathematics:
1 (basis for all real numbers)
0 (necessary for doing algebra)
i (basis for all imaginary numbers)
e (important for doing exponential functions)
Pie (necessary for doing math with circles)
All these numbers are seemingly unrelated to each other but they fit together in the equation named “Euler’s Identity”.
This equation was discovered by Euler–one of the greatest mathematicians in history–and he saw this as proof that math was created by God.
2) The Mandelbrot Set:
Set= a collection of elements with a common defined property.
In most sets, some numbers are included while others are excluded (i.e. an even numbers set, an odd numbers set, a negative numbers set).
In some sets you can easily tell if a number belongs just by looking at it, other sets are more complicated than that, like the Mandelbrot Set.
The Mandelbrot Set also includes the “complex” and “imaginary” numbers.
The Mandelbrot Set is generated by a simple equation in the complex plane but it produces infinite detail. You can keep zooming in on the shape it creates and it'll keep showing more and more complexity even though no human designed this.
It is infinite and not found anywhere in our universe, so whatever created it needed to be infinite and not from our universe.
Evidential
Giving Evidence of Supernatural Events
This method obviously includes all other methods, but I included it in order to cover a few more reasons to believe in God which haven’t been pointed out yet. (Note: this is not even close to an extensive list of the Evidential proofs for God’s existence, just a small taste)
Historical Example:
Roman Sleptsuk, The Resurrection
Proof for the Resurrection of Christ
(Lee Strobel’s “The Case for Christ” Series; Gary Habermas “The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus”, etc.)
Archaeological Evidence:
Biblical Events, Locations, People, etc. (Answers in Genesis; Museum of the Bible; Genesis Apologetics)
Scientific Examples:
The World Wide Flood (AnswersinGenesis.com)
Irreducible Complexity (Incredible Creatures that Defy Evolution; It Couldn't Just Happen: Knowing the Truth About God's Awesome Creation by Lawrence O. Richards)
The Goldilocks Zone (Earth was Designed for Us)
Supernatural Evidence:
Demonic/Angelic Encounters
Near Death/Temporarily Dead Experiences
For even more information about why you should believe in God, visit our “Why Should I Accept What the Bible Has to Say?” page which answers the question “Why Should I Believe God Exists?” along with many other related questions.
This series of blog posts titled, “Holding on to Reason”, is named after Amanda’s favorite C.S. Lewis quote: “Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.”