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1. The Christian God is defined as a personal being who
knows everything. According to Christians, personal beings have free
will.
2. In order to have free will, you must have more than one option, each
of which is avoidable. This means that before you make a choice, there
must be a state of uncertainty during a period of potential: you cannot
know the future. Even if you think you can predict your decision, if you
claim to have free will, you must admit the potential (if not the
desire) to change your mind before the decision is final.
3. A being who knows everything can have no "state of uncertainty." It
knows its choices in advance.
4. A being that knows its choices in advance has no potential to avoid
its choices, and therefore lacks free will.
5. Since a being that lacks free will is not a personal being, a
personal being who knows everything cannot exist.
6. Therefore, the Christian God does not exist.
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Argument FOR God's Existence
Argument AGAINST God's Existence
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"It thus remained that this idea had been placed in me by
a nature truly more perfect than I was and that it even had within
itself all the perfections of which I could have any idea, that is to
say, to explain myself in a single word, that it was God. To this I
added that, since I knew of some perfections that I did not at all
possess, I was not the only being that existed, but that of necessity
there must be something else more perfect, upon which I depended, and
from which I had acquired all that I had. For, had I been alone and
independent of everything else, so that I had had from myself all the
small amount of perfection in which I participated in the perfect being,
I would have been able, for the same reason, to have from myself
everything else I knew I lacked, and thus to be myself infinite,
eternal, unchanging, all-knowing, all-powerful; in short, to have all
the perfections I could observe to be in God." -An argument from
Descartes Discourse on Method.
This is the Ontological Argument for the existence of
God, which basically states that since we can mentally grasp the concept
of God, he must exist. |