Proofs for the Existence of God
PROOFS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD. Early generations of Christian thinkers accepted God's existence as a given that needed no proof and was surmised on the basis of immediate evidence in an act that did not clearly distinguish faith from reason. The dominant exponent of this approach was Augustine (d. 430), who posited, for instance, an awareness of God as "first truth" in the intuition of truth as such that occurs in the depths of human consciousness. Bonaventure (d. 1274) was a legitimate heir of Augustine in the medieval period, as was Blaise Pascal (d. 1662) in the modern era. Nicolas Malebranche (d. 1715), by contrast, promoted an ontologism, in which "God" is made the first innate idea implanted in the human mind, of which all other ideas are modifications.
The Ontological Argument
Those who have sought God's existence by deploying the processes of reasoning have done so in one of two ways: either a priori or a posteriori. The first approach derives God's existence from an idea of him in the consciousness of the knower. The original formulation of this argument is that of Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109); it describes God as "that than which a greater cannot be conceived." Such a notion demands, for Anselm, God's real existence (Proslogion 2), and indeed entails it as something necessary (Proslogion 3).
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