God exists if there is faith.

Freud said God is an exalted father.

Jung disagreed.

I cannot believe in a deity. There is no logic I have ever seen that could possibly make me believe it firmly.

The only solid justification for a faith in God or eternity or spirituality is through love--never wanting to be separated from those whom you love, or a person.

What gives me second thoughts is the painful painful idea of losing the person I love in death. It is painful to think of such a separation. That is what belief is god is based on often... Fear.

thanks all yours, FYI Kant has the classic argument against Anselm's OA. It is probably the least favorite theist argument, but I think it is amazingly elegant. Your post just gave me an excuse to post it.

What theistic arguments supporting the existence in God are worth mentioning? Because I want to believe in God.

IMO one finds the way to God thru the heart, not the head. It is by faith, not reason. It is the place of reason to test what we believe by faith to ensure it is not in conflict with reason, which would make the belief foolish.

I believe the cosmological argument is a reasonable argument that there is, or at least was a necessary being. I also believe that skeptical theism is a sufficient argument against the argument from evil, which is the most robust argument against the existence of God.

No. a statement, sentence, or a proposition (as a type of statement), is a collection of words which needs to be interpreted. And then, what is taken as the meaning is judged as true or false. That judgement is subjective, attributable to the subject.. — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm still not sure I understand your meaning of the term 'judgement'. Could you perhaps give an example of judgement, and then in contrast, an example of proposition?

If agreement between us. concerning our judgements, makes our judgements "objective", then you are using a different meaning of "objective" than I, which I defined as "of the object". Agreement on judgements about the object doesn't make the agreement "of the object". — Metaphysician Undercover

It is not the agreement that makes a judgement objective. I think we are on the same page that 'objective' means "a property of the object independent of subjects", where as 'subjective' means "a view on the object dependant on the subject". E.g. the Earth was round before earthling subjects existed. Thus the judgement "the Earth is round" is objective.

Fellow philosophers,

I will be very busy for the next couple of days, and will not be as responsive on this discussion as I would like to be. Sorry for the inconvenience. I hope to get back to it once my busy period is over, but I understand if you have moved on by then.

Keep it reasonable,
-Samuel

"The Fourth Way argument goes as far as to prove that there must exist a being whose essence is moral goodness to the maximum degree."

I agree that Christians attach the label "God" to the entities that Aquinas reaches at the end of his Ways. But the Fourth Way does not argue that God's essence is *goodness*. It argues that there is something that is maximally true, maximally good, maximally noble, maximally existing, and from the further premise from Aristotle that the maximally true are maximally existing, we are left to infer that the same X is maximally T, G, N and E. It goes on to conclude that this X is the cause of EG and "of any perfection whatsoever" [cuiuslibet perfectionis] for all entities. Nothing is said about X's essence's being identical with its existence. (That thesis, by the way, is not argued for in the Second Way, as you said above that it is. The Second Way is an argument about first efficient cause.) In your OP, after all, you wrote "And these beings are called perfect because they have goodness of that nature to the maximum degree ..." or there exists a being such.

More argumentation is needed to demonstrate that if X is maximally good, X is Goodness. I should think that the Fourth Way does not argue that X is goodness, but rather, that X is maximally Good and causes other, subordinate beings to be good. X has the property maximally but is not the property itself. The 4th Way concludes with this claim, that X is the cause of goodness for all entities. But if X just is good*ness*, then Aquinas would be concluding that X is the cause of X, i.e. of itself, for all entities. Given that X turns out to be God, I don't know how one could that God is the cause of God for all entities, since God is uncaused. God exists necessarily? But that's not the point of an argument from maximum degrees of properties.

I don't think the Fourth Way is that great. It's not demonstrated that maximal truth, maximal goodness, maximal nobility and maximal existence are distributed over the same x; we only get a citation from the Metaphysics that what are maximally true are also maximally existing. It's not clear whether properties that don't fall into Aquinas' list of transcendentals (nobility is generally not put on that list, BTW) also get distributed over the same X. One might think that they are not so; e.g. in the case of hot, which Aquinas uses twice as an example, the maximally true/good/noble/existing entity is not also the maximally hot entity. I think here of Parmenides' question about hair, mud and dirt, heh heh. So the "cuiuslibet perfectionis" premise would be false. Further, if "the maximally F is cause of F over all x's" thesis does not hold for all values of F, then the 4th Way seems to fail to establish a universal cause.

Finally, there is the old "existence is not a perfection" problem.

I think the argument in the De Ente et Essentia is stronger than the Fourth Way, though it too gets tangled up in making existence a perfection. In the ST, at any rate, it is only in 3.4 that God's essence and existence are argued to be identical. So one is not authorized to use "God's essence is identical to God's existence" as a premise in the Ways back in 2.3.

Objection: Yes, the perfect natures exist, but some are man-made, as is the case for a hammer or a unicorn, thereby making these perfect natures to exist in the mind only. How do we know this is not the case for morality as well? — Samuel Lacrampe

My thought is that the morality of cultures is different from the morality of a divine, holy entity. The morality of cultures must be anthropologically discerned or observed through the people's actions. Divine morality is given through the being's words to a people/peoples to affect their actions. So yes, divine revelation has cultural effects. This is why people get the two moralities confused.

Didnt kierkegaard say that a true belief is a skeptical one?

I'm still not sure I understand your meaning of the term 'judgement'. Could you perhaps give an example of judgement, and then in contrast, an example of proposition? — Samuel Lacrampe

Let's say "the earth is round" is a proposition. If I claim that what this proposition means, is that the planet we live on, is the shape of a circle, then this is my judgement of what "the earth is round" means. Once I have judged what "the earth is round" means, I can make a further judgement as to whether that proposition is true or false.

E.g. the Earth was round before earthling subjects existed. Thus the judgement "the Earth is round" is objective. — Samuel Lacrampe

As far as I know, only subjects make judgements. So a judgement cannot be objective (of the object), because a judgement is always the property of a subject. One makes a judgement concerning an object, but that judgement is not properly "of the object" because it is property of the subject, it is "of the subject". And this is evident from the fact that such judgements vary in accuracy.

Instead of using good and evil, one could also use ignorance as a premise.

• P1: If there exist beings with varying degrees of a property, then there must exist a being with that property to the minimum/maximum degree.
• P2: There exist beings with varying degrees of ignorance.
• C: There exists a being with a minimum degree of ignorance (which is what we call God).

P1 argument does not cut it for me; just because a maximum possible quantity exists it does not follow there is an object with such a quantity.

Now the prime mover, I mostly buy...

Maximum here means more than all others. But who are all others? Humans? Other entities? You could take the most morally responsible / least ignorant human for a god, but it is a small world. The existence of infinite lifeforms / forms of consciousness might be required for this premise to work. This is unfortunately unprovable by scientific means.

Yes so it might be that the being with greatest good has only say 97% good. That does not square with some of the traditional views of god...

Infinity is provably not part of the material world (discussed at length here https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/4073/do-you-believe-in-the-actually-infinite).

The non-material, if it exists, is less constrained...