Theme
God
20 philosophers, 4 traditions
Does God exist, can reason prove it, and what could God be? Muslim, Jewish, Christian and Hindu thinkers built arguments, while Buddhist and sceptical ones took them apart.
In Western philosophy of religion, the ultimate reality has usually been called God, though other traditions have conceived it as brahman, the Dao and more, and each has been modelled in many ways. Philosophers in the Abrahamic traditions set out to prove that God exists and to say what God must be like. Anselm argued from the very idea of God; al-Kindi from the need for a “true One” behind all unity; Avicenna from the distinction between what exists necessarily and what exists only possibly; Maimonides and Aquinas from the motion and order of the world, Maimonides adding that such proofs show that God is, never what God is.
In India, Madhva defended a personal God, Viṣṇu, distinct from souls and the world, while the Buddhist Vasubandhu argued that no single creator could be the cause of everything.
In early modern Europe, Spinoza identified God with the necessary order of nature rather than a creator who chooses. In Hume’s Dialogues the sceptic Philo attacked the argument from design, and Kant held that God’s existence cannot be known, only believed on moral grounds.
Through time
6th century BCE
Xenophanes
The gods of the poets are human beings writ large. The divine is instead one greatest god, unlike mortals in form or thought, who sees and hears as a whole, stays forever in one place and moves all things by the power of its mind.
5th century BCE
Protagoras
Whether the gods exist, and what form they take, cannot be known: the question is too obscure and human life too short. This is a confession of ignorance, not a denial.
About 400 years later
1st century BCE
Cicero
In On the Nature of the Gods he sets Epicurean and Stoic theology against sceptical criticism. Since at most one of the many views can be right, the question stays open, and even traditional religion must wait on the outcome of the inquiry.
Lucretius
The gods exist, but they are perfectly happy beings with bodies too fine to see, living apart from the world and untouched by human prayers or anger. Fear of divine rule is the chief obstacle to happiness, and natural science cures it.
About 500 years later
4th century CE
Vasubandhu
No single creator made the world: living beings arise from many conditions. The idea of Īśvara as the one cause of everything even undermines itself, since the reasons anyone has for believing it would then be God’s doing too.
About 400 years later
9th century CE
al-Kindi
The world is not eternal but created, and its creator is the “true One”, the source of all unity in other things. That One is so simple that our language, made to describe things with many features, cannot properly apply to it.
John Scottus Eriugena
God is beyond being and non-being, and so best called “nothing through excellence”. He is at once the beginning, middle and end of all nature, which goes out from him and returns to him.
11th century
Avicenna
Whatever exists either exists necessarily in itself or is merely possible and owes its existence to a cause. So there must be a Necessary Existent, uncaused and unique, and God’s existence belongs to the study of existence as such.
Anselm of Canterbury
God’s existence can be shown from the very idea of God. Whoever understands “that than which a greater cannot be thought” must grant that it exists in reality as well as in thought, since otherwise something greater could be conceived.
12th century
Maimonides
God’s existence can be proved: the endless motion of the heavens needs an infinite power, and nothing bodily, nor any power lodged in a body, could supply it. But such proofs show only that God is, never what God is.
13th century
Bonaventure
God’s existence is so evident that the mind cannot, strictly, think he does not exist; atheism comes from a mistaken idea of what God is. Every creature is a sign of God as its cause, and every truth leads back to the truth that is God.
Drew on Anselm of Canterbury and Avicenna
Thomas Aquinas
Natural reason can prove that God exists, by showing that the changing world needs a first cause of its existence, motion and order; these are his “five ways”. Anselm’s ontological argument, however, proves nothing.
Drew on Avicenna; argued against Anselm of Canterbury
Madhva
God, identified with Viṣṇu, is a real and personal being, distinct from individual souls and from the world, and pre-eminent among all deities for his unique qualities. Our everyday experience of being different from God confirms what scripture teaches.
Meister Eckhart
God is pure existence overflowing into creation, and at the same time a “nothing”, a desert and an abyss beyond every image and name. The soul emptied of all things finds God in its own ground, where the two are one.
Drew on Thomas Aquinas, Maimonides and John Scottus Eriugena
15th century
Nicholas of Cusa
God is the absolute maximum, beyond all comparison with finite things, in whom every opposite coincides. We can never grasp God in concepts, but images such as the infinite circle, enfolding and unfolding, and God as “Not Other” let the mind reach towards what it cannot comprehend.
Drew on John Scottus Eriugena
16th century
Giordano Bruno
God’s infinite power must express itself in an infinite universe, so a finite creation would be incoherent. God is hidden in himself, yet unfolded throughout nature, which is “God in things”.
Drew on Nicholas of Cusa and Lucretius
17th century
Baruch Spinoza
God is not a transcendent creator who chooses to make a world, nor a judge to be feared. Everything follows necessarily from the divine nature, and God is known through philosophy and science, which bring freedom rather than superstition.
Drew on Maimonides
Nicolas Malebranche
God is the only true cause: nothing else has a necessary connection to its effects. We even see bodies through ideas that exist in God, and God governs the world by simple, general laws rather than by particular acts of will.
18th century
David Hume
Arguments from design fail: the world resembles a human artefact only vaguely, so its order cannot show that an intelligent creator made it. Hume gave these objections to the sceptic Philo in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published after his death.
Drew on Cicero; drew on and argued against Nicolas Malebranche
Immanuel Kant
God’s existence cannot be known, but morality gives us grounds to believe it. We are bound to pursue the highest good, a world of complete virtue and happiness, and we can believe that goal possible only if God exists.
Drew on and argued against David Hume
Sources
- Jeanine Diller, God and Other Ultimates, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy