© 2006 David Roemer
dkroemer@optonline.net

Proof of God's Existence

Proposition #1: I exist. I am a real being, not a mental being.1

Proposition #2: I am not many beings, I am one being.2

Proposition #3: Every real being must have the sufficient reason (grounding its intelligibility) either in itself or in some other real being.3

Proposition #4: Either a being's sufficient reason is in the being itself or it is in some other being.

Proposition #5: If a being's sufficient reason is in some other being, the being is contingent.

Proposition #6: If a being's sufficient reason is in the being itself, the being is self-sufficient.

Proposition #7: Every contingent being has a cause.4

Proposition #8: There exists at least one self-sufficient being in the universe.5

Proposition #9: A being which begins to exist at some point in time is a contingent being.6

Proposition #10: A being which is a composition of other beings is a contingent being.7

Proposition #11: A being which is finite is a contingent being.8

Proposition #12: A self-sufficient being is supernatural because it is a being that always existed, is not finite, and is not a composition of other beings. QED.

Footnotes

  1. A human being is a rational animal, that is, one that possesses free will and conscious knowledge in contrast to animals which have only cognition from their senses. Rationality includes the ability to imagine beings which don’t really exist, like Santa Claus. Santa Claus is a mental being. I use the personal pronoun to emphasize that this is a fundamental intellectual experience, not an observation coming from one of the five senses.
  2. A property of a real being is unity. A stamp collection, for example, is not unified and exists only in the minds of a stamp collector. The rationality of human beings—freedom and knowledge—means that human beings possess a center of action, as it were, and that a human being is not a collection of beings, but a single unified being.
  3. This is called the principle of sufficient reason or the principle of the intelligibility of being. I am quoting from a textbook on metaphysics (W. Norris Clark, The One and the Many). The principle is rooted in our desire and drive to know things and the assumption that the universe makes sense and everything has an explanation. This is why we rely of the results of experiments in science and why we look for misplaced keys and wallets.
  4. This is the principle of causality. Notice that it does not say: Every being has a cause. David Hume mistakenly thought this was the principle of causality and started the fallacious refutation: Who made God? Notice, too, that cause and effect occur simultaneously. Cause precedes the effect in the order of causality, not the order of time. The concepts of being, reason, and causality are fundamental and can't be fully explicated as can the concepts of science. An insight into what we mean by causality comes from free will: When we make and carry out a decision, there is a cause and an effect.
  5. It is possible to have a finite chain of contingent beings: A is caused by B, B is caused by C, C is caused by D, etc. However, there must exist a self-sufficient being outside of the chain giving the chain existence. By induction, an infinite chain is also possible with the same proviso. However, an infinite chain creates a paradox in the order of discovery: You discover A, then you discover B, then you discover C, etc. , and you never find the beginning of the chain. However, the order of causality goes in the opposite direct: B must exist before A, C must exist before B, and so on.
  6. This is a hypothetical proposition: If a being begins to exist at some point in time, it needs a cause.
  7. A possible example of a being that is a composition of other beings is man. According to Thomas Aquinas: Man is a metaphysical composition of a material incomplete being and an immaterial incomplete being. This analysis constitutes a rejection of Greek dualism which thinks in terms of material and immaterial substances.
  8. Finite beings not hypothetical because finite beings exist. We are finite beings because I exist and you exist, but I am not you and you are not me. In other words, our being is limited to ourselves. A finite being can’t be the reason for its own existence because it can’t exist except as finite. A finite being can’t limit itself, just as a being which begins to exist at some point in time can’t be the cause of its own existence.