In our secular era, more and more people saythat faith requires evidence of the existence of God. For a deeply believing person, God exists, and it is not necessary to prove this to this person, much less to God. There is no God for an atheist, and it is difficult for a religious person to provide quite scientific evidence to change his point of view. But, nevertheless, the dispute between atheists and believers has been going on for more than one thousand years, and during this time a whole system of evidence has been worked out in favor of the existence and non-existence of God. Why does this argument last indefinitely, and the debaters undergo the same fiasco? And are these discussions necessary at all? Let's try to figure it out.
The mistake of the theologians of the past is that theythey tried to prove the presence of the Supreme Force, the Supreme Being, the First Cause, etc., based on observations of this, the material world, and tried to provide scientific evidence of the existence of God. By the way, especially in this succeeded the Christian tradition, starting with Tertullian, Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas Aquinas and ending with Kant. In the Middle Ages, philosophy was considered “the handmaiden of theology,” but theology used the language of philosophy to prove the existence of God. In 1078, Anselm of Canterbury, turning for some reason not to people, but to God, brings such an argument to prove to God His being a priori: in the human mind there is the concept of absolute perfection. But if an absolutely perfect being is not present, does not exist in the real world, then in this way it is not absolutely and completely perfect. There is a contradiction from which Anselm concludes that God exists. Despite the fact that numerous theologians based on such a priori evidence, it does not withstand the criticism of atheists: if people, in varying degrees of imperfection, exist in this real world, this does not mean that an absolutely perfect being exists in it.
Блестящий теолог-схоласт Фома Аквинский попытался get out of this situation by putting forward your five proofs of the existence of God using a posteriori arguments. Again, these arguments are based on the study of this material world. The first proof is through movement: everything in this world moves for some reason. Consequently, there is a certain immovable engine, that is, God. The second argument is the absolute cause of all consequences. Nothing created is its own cause. Hence, there must be the root cause of everything, that is, God. The third argument is cosmological: since there is time and objects exist in time (that is, they once have arisen), then there is a certain timeless essence that caused time and existence of things in time and space, that is, God.
But, atheists will say, after listening to these 3 arguments,here is given a completely unproved and unscientific premise, in itself God belongs to the next sequence, is not an integral part of it. Even if we assume that there is a certain entity that completes the chain of ascent to the root cause of this world, and call it God, this does not mean that this entity is endowed with other qualities that are attributed to God: grace, omnipotence, ability to read in hearts, let go sins. These three ontological proofs of the existence of God gave rise to a Christian theodicy, designed to justify God - the Creator of the material world for the evil that filled this world. If the good God created our world, then why is this world not good? If this world is not good, then maybe God did not create it?
Четвертый аргумент Фомы – это доказательство от degrees of perfection: there is absolute grace, and in this world we observe its lesser manifestations. But evil is not a lack of grace, where did it come from? We cannot call all maxims God. And the fifth argument is proof through expediency: everything is created for a specific purpose, and this supreme goal is with God.
Philosopher E.Kant refutes evidence of the existence of God Thomas Aquinas and puts forward his own: since in the human heart there are demands for justice, righteousness, kindness, that is, concepts that are meaningless in this world, because they do not bring material benefits, therefore, these concepts are given to us from another world, where "new earth and new heaven", on which the truth resides. This concept of God as a moral demand, a categorical imperative, pushing people to commit good and gratuitous deeds, is the main argument of the moral proof of the existence of God. Since in this world there is no more useless phenomenon than virtue.
