Does God exist? Philosophers give 5 main answers: theism, deism, pantheism, agnosticism and atheism. AskPhilosophy presents 67 arguments, from Heraclitus of Ephesus to Stephen Hawking, reconstructed step by step, logic-checked and verified word for word against their original texts. The best known: "The wager" (Blaise Pascal).
The 5 possible answers
Each column is one way of answering the question: what it holds and the philosophers who defend it. Click a column to see only its arguments.
A creator God exists, distinct from the world, who knows and wills.
Pascal, Leibniz, Anselme de Cantorbéry, Thomas d'Aquin…
A creator God exists, but does not intervene in the world: no providence, no miracles, no revelation.
Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Matthew Tindal, Edward Herbert de Cherbury
God and Nature are one: no creator outside the world.
Spinoza, Cicéron, Zhu Xi, Bruno…
Reason cannot decide: we cannot know whether God exists.
Hume, Charles Darwin, Kant, Russell…
There is no God, or no good reason to believe in one.
Hume, Russell, Marx, John Leslie Mackie…
The arguments
Click an argument to see it step by step, with the objections and replies.
Theism
A creator God exists, distinct from the world, who knows and wills.
29 argumentsThe wager
If God exists you win infinite happiness; if not, you lose only something finite, and you cannot abstain from betting.
The best of all possible worlds
A perfectly wise and good God sees all possible worlds and cannot but choose the best one.
That than which nothing greater can be conceived exists
A being than which nothing greater can be conceived, if it existed only in the mind, could be thought greater by also existing.
The third way: the contingent and the necessary
If everything could fail to exist, there would have been a time when nothing existed, and then nothing would exist now.
If it is possible, it exists: the modal ontological argument
A maximally great being is possible, so it exists in some possible world; if it exists in one world, it exists in all.
The fine-tuning of the universe: too perfect a coincidence?
A universe fine-tuned for life is far more likely if God exists than in a single universe without a designer, where it would be luck.
Whatever begins has a cause: the universe too
Whatever begins has a cause; the universe began; its beginningless cause can only be an agent who freely chooses.
Sufficient reason: why something rather than nothing?
Everything has a reason, and the whole series of things that might not have been cannot hold its own reason: it lies outside the series.
The unmoved first mover
Whatever moves is moved by something else, and the chain cannot go back forever: there must be a first mover that is not moved.
Evil is not a thing: privation and free will
Whatever exists is good; evil is a lack of good, coming from the free will turning away from the higher good.
Providence after Lisbon
A perfect God, wise, powerful and just, makes the whole good, and makes the soul immortal to make up for suffering.
The watch and the eye
A watch whose parts are fitted to a purpose has a maker; living things show an arrangement at least as fine, so they have a designer.
The ontological proof
I clearly conceive that existence belongs to the perfect being, and what belongs to a thing's nature truly belongs to it.
God is not a hundred thalers: Hegel defends the ontological proof against Kant
Thinking of a hundred thalers does not make them exist, but God is not a finite thing: his concept unites thought and being.
The world began, so it has a cause
An infinity of revolutions already elapsed is impossible, so the world began, and whatever begins has a cause.
The necessary existent: the proof of the truthful
Whatever is merely possible gets its existence from a cause; the whole of such beings needs a cause outside it, necessary in itself.
A little philosophy inclines to atheism, depth brings men back to religion
A shallow look sees scattered causes; a deeper one finds them linked in an ordered chain, which cannot come from chance.
Providence and invention
Everything here below suits human existence, and this fit cannot be chance; whatever is invented has an inventor.
Freedom has a price: evil does not contradict God
A world of free creatures is worth more than a world of automata, and God cannot force free beings to do only good.
If our reason comes from blind evolution, can we trust it?
Unguided evolution keeps what helps us survive, not what is true: our faculties would then be unreliable.
The moral law points to a lawgiver
Objective moral duties need a real foundation, and neither nature, evolution nor society can provide it.
Where does consciousness come from? From the physical you only get the physical
A scientific explanation leads only from the physical to the physical, and consciousness is not physical.
If God seems present, he probably is
When something seems present it probably is, barring reasons for doubt; and many people sense God's presence.
God, cause of the idea of the infinite
An idea has a cause at least as real as it represents; only an infinite being can cause the idea of the infinite in me.
Three kinds of evil, and a world that does not exist for man alone
Evils come from the body, from other people and from ourselves, mostly from ourselves: the world was not made for us alone.
The planets all turn the same way: this system has a Lord
Gravity keeps the planets in orbit but does not explain their layout, so regular while the comets roam everywhere.
A desire nothing in this world can satisfy
Every natural desire has its object in the world; we have one nothing here can fill, so its object must exist elsewhere.
Pain, God's megaphone
We can ignore pleasure and overlook our faults, but not pain: it forces us to see that something is wrong.
I am not the author of what I see: God is
I do not choose what my senses bring me, and ideas cannot cause anything: so it is the act of another mind.
Deism
A creator God exists, but does not intervene in the world: no providence, no miracles, no revelation.
5 argumentsLisbon: against "all is well"
Evil strikes the innocent and no one shows it was necessary, so we cannot claim that all is well.
Every work demonstrates a workman
The world everywhere shows means arranged for an end, and any work of that kind points to a maker.
The only word of God is the Creation we behold
A word of God for all must be universal and unalterable; no book is, only the Creation that anyone can read.
Natural religion is perfect: revelation can add nothing to it
A perfect God gave everyone, from the beginning, a perfect law: a late revelation can only restate its content.
Five common notions are enough: the religion all peoples recognise
Five truths about God, worship and virtue are recognised everywhere, and what all recognise comes from nature, which God made for all.
Pantheism
God and Nature are one: no creator outside the world.
8 argumentsWhy do good people suffer? Fire tests gold
Hardships are not real evils: like a demanding father, God sends them to good people to make them stronger.
The world has an architect (Balbus against Cotta)
Regular order always comes from a mind, and chance cannot produce it, yet the order of the heavens exceeds that of our own works.
God, or Nature
Only one reality can exist by itself: everything else is part of it and follows from it of necessity.
The "Lord on High" is principle, not a person
The Sovereign is the principle, which does not exist apart from things and has no intention or will to make.
An infinite cause, an infinite universe
An infinite power produces everything possible, and in God power and action are one: so the universe is infinite.
All is one: divinity within the world
Matter draws its forms from within itself, and one world-soul is wholly in every thing: the divine is in the world.
One logos governs all: the divine is the unity of the world's opposites
One wisdom governs all things, no one made the world, and the god is day and night, winter and summer: the divine is the world itself.
Spinoza's God: the harmony of the laws, not a God who concerns himself with mankind
If everything follows laws, a divine will cannot be an extra cause; what remains is awe before the order of the world.
Agnosticism
Reason cannot decide: we cannot know whether God exists.
8 argumentsAgainst the design argument
An analogy is strong only if the cases resemble each other, and the universe resembles a human-made machine very little.
Existence is not a predicate
Existing adds nothing to the concept of a thing: a hundred real thalers contain no more than a hundred imagined ones.
Against the first cause: "the universe is just there"
What holds for each thing need not hold for the whole: every man has a mother, but humanity does not.
Blind Saunderson: order without a designer
Another explanation is possible: matter produced many beings and only the well-formed ones lasted, with no designer.
The wasp that devours the caterpillar
A good God willing every detail would not have made the cruelty found in living things, which natural selection does predict.
Against miracles
A miracle violates laws established by constant experience; testimony counts only if its being false would be even more miraculous.
I had no need of that hypothesis
The solar system is stable by its own laws and its arrangement may follow from them: better admit ignorance than posit God.
Do not claim to know what you do not know
Claiming certainty without enough proof is wrong, and reason has not settled God's existence: believing or denying both claim to know.
Atheism
There is no God, or no good reason to believe in one.
17 argumentsThe problem of evil
An all-powerful God could prevent evil, a perfectly good God would want to; yet suffering is real and often extreme.
The celestial teapot: who must prove it?
Whoever claims something exists must prove it, and no proof of God's existence holds up.
Religion, the opium of the people
Religion arises from an unjust society, where people put in heaven what they lack on earth: it soothes without curing.
The worst of all possible worlds
Suffering is real and no happiness cancels it; a world with uncompensated suffering would have been better not to exist.
The fawn in the fire: evil makes God improbable
Some intense suffering brings no visible good, and a perfectly good God would prevent it.
The paradox of omnipotence
Whether he can create something he cannot control or cannot, either way there is something he cannot do.
Religions contradict each other: why believe your own?
Religions contradict each other, and each rests on the same kinds of reasons: a holy book, an experience, an inherited tradition.
Eternal punishment for the faults of one life: the problem of hell
Limited wrongs in a finite life do not deserve endless suffering, so a just God could not inflict it.
Who designed the designer?
A designer of the whole universe would itself be very complex, hence very improbable, and positing it explains nothing.
Religion as man's projection
The qualities given to God (reason, love, goodness) are human qualities raised to infinity, so their subject is human too.
If God knows everything in advance, am I free?
God believed long ago what I will do tomorrow and cannot be wrong; the past is fixed, so I cannot do otherwise.
Why would God hide?
A perfectly loving God would be open to everyone, yet some blameless people do not believe in him and cannot seek him.
Talk of God is meaningless
A sentence is meaningful only if true by definition or checkable by observation; "God exists" is neither.
Religion, an illusion born of wishes
Religious doctrines answer exactly the wishes born of our childhood helplessness: protection, justice, life after death.
The historical refutation
If the proofs of God have failed and the belief can be explained without God existing, there is no longer a reason to hold it.
The Religion of Humanity
People need a religion, but God cannot be demonstrated; Humanity, which is real, can fill the same role.
Time begins with the Big Bang: there is no 'before' in which a creator could have acted
Time itself begins with the Big Bang: with no 'before', there is no moment in which a cause, or a creator, could have acted.
Other philosophers' positions arrive as profiles are completed. No position is presented as the winner.