Monday, June 29, 2009

Existence of God

Many arguments which attempt to prove or disprove the existence of God have been proposed by philosophers, theologians, and other thinkers for many centuries. In philosophical terminology, such arguments concern schools of thought on the epistemology of the ontology of God.
There are many philosophical issues concerning the existence of God. Some definitions of God are sometimes nonspecific, while other definitions can be self-contradictory. Arguments for the existence of God typically include metaphysical, empirical, inductive, and subjective types, while others revolve around holes in evolutionary theory and order and complexity in the world. Arguments against the existence of God typically include empirical, deductive, and inductive types. Conclusions reached include: "God does not exist" (strong atheism); "God almost certainly does not exist"(de facto atheism); "no one knows whether God exists" (agnosticism); "God exists, but this cannot be proven or disproven" (theism); and "God exists and this can be proven" (theism). There are numerous variations on these positions.
A recent argument for the existence of God is intelligent design,[17] which asserts that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection."[18] It is a modern form of the traditional argument from design, modified to avoid specifying the nature or identity of the designer. Its primary proponents, all of whom are associated with the Discovery Institute,[19] believe the designer to be the Abrahamic God.

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