I will start with the ontological argument.
Something that is impossible to exist, cannot exist by definition and so doesn't exist.
Something that is possible to exist has two possibilities, it exists or doesn't exist.
Something that exists necessarily, cannot but exist by definition and so it exists.
Descartes argument from what I understand unlike what is taught in Academia goes something like:
There are levels of existence.
The highest level type is necessary.
God is defined to be so great or perfect and so as far as this issue goes, it would be a necessary being.
If God is properly defined to be necessary, it follows it exists in the real world.
That is we can see by merely remembering God is necessary by the concept of necessary, that it exists.
Some proofs to the above.
God is life to the absolute to the extent there can't be more possible life/existence then it (by definition).
If any life/existence is possible without God (any independent aside from God is possible) in any possible world, then God (not a Creator or lesser god is meant here, but the big absolute being) is not possible.
God is possible.
Therefore any life/existence is impossible without God.
It follows then God exists.
In fact, it's easy to see:
If God exists, he would be a necessary being.
If a necessary being exists, it would be possible for us to recognize that as an aspect or trait of it.
The predicate contention doesn't make sense:
(1) It's a red herring if true since those categories exist anyway.
(2) A dependent existence is lower then an independent or necessary existence as far existence attribute goes.
The bold is purposeful and self-explanatory.
(3) It would make necessary existence incoherent but then the same can be said about impossible to exist, and both are coherent and are directly related to the issue of existence.
If a necessary being can be conceived, it definitely has to exist.
When we think of God not only is it a candidate for necessity in definition, but it's in fact impossible any other thing exists by necessity but it.
At the end, the only faith premise is: "God is possibly conceived to be possible". If this is true, then he will be proven to exist by reflecting over what absolute existence implies.
I will be discussing more proofs.
Can't we reduce this to...if there is something then something is possible. To ask the question necessitates there is something so we substantiate through a tight circular argument that whatsoever we might choose to understand the existence of is thereby, through logic, identified as a valid question.
The problem is is that this is a form of thinking that focuses on word meaning and assumes that knowledge arises in a single mind. This assumption has the flaw that although we experience knowledge in our own minds as a private conscious act it is never true that that private conscious act occurs independently of the social development of language in that mind as a cooperative training up of vocal utterances (words) to correlate with experience-able realities (meanings, facts) in all their various sensory, intuitive and evaluative richness.
It is the same issue whenever we try to deal with "whole terms" or words which stand in for the set of all things. God, being, consciousness, universe...these words beg for circular meaning when used in logical expressions because they take on a magical quality of getting to escape, ironically, any physical, real-world consequences. They are like words that turn arguments into mobius strips where both sides are the same side and, in the end, all rational argument is equivocated.
Now I believe that rationality is useful to the extent that we can come up with reproducible understandings of finite events. Equivocation of the opposites is a mystical truth that is useful in allowing us to recognize the boundaries of our knowledge and seeing through excessive claims of rationality. Mystical truth shows us the sphexishness of rationality.
The inscrutably ordered chaos of the natural world is all around us. Our patterned simplification of this chaotic order creates the sense of a persistent being as a reality. That something more permanent than our attention span, our lives exists gives us the confidence that there is a thing we can call being that is reliable and dependent. Look at that featureless wall...surely it speaks to our immortality!
This is the basis of truth in the human mind in terms of metaphors. Meaning arises from patterned similarities derived from our experiences in our bodies of the physical world. These patterns in turn give us in the human brain to meta patterns to which we can attach words as labels. Meta-patterns loose their physicality-ness as they become more and more internal, brain patterns of recognition. Abstracted mental experience attached to a word gives us a sense of non-physical reality even as that sense is still built up upon a mountain of metaphors that all run back to our bodily, physical experience. So long as a community of "languagers" exists that will support such an abstract, linguistic reference we can individually contemplate that which seems non-physical due to the remoteness of a word's reference to that which we experience as a finite physicality.
God is a featureless wall is an apt metaphor here as is being is a featureless wall and God is being (I am).
But on a much longer scale we know that things are always in motion, always changing. There is a mystery as to where things ultimately come from, how they manage to persist and how they are finally destroyed. This is another way of approaching the mystery of being. From this view there is an infinity of action, of cause and effect, moving forward and backward in time from where we stand which seems to form up a layered reality where we see things arising out of a supportive, creative background. One can, from this perspective, argue that there are layers both above and below those that we are aware of and call our own. "What layer does God exist in?" becomes the natural question.
