PHIL 111 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Agnosticism, Status Quo, Unmoved Mover

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Philosophy
• Course: PHIL 111
• Professor: Jon Miller

Document Summary

Short for five ways of proving god"s existence . All arguments follow the same basic course: starting with something familiar and widely accepted, they attempt to deduce the existence of some transcendent cause. The argument from modality: some things can fail to exist, not everything can fail to exist, sub-proof. If something can fail to exist, then there must have been a time when it has failed to exist. If everything can fail to exist, then there must have been a time when nothing existed. But if there were such a time, the world would not exist, for something can only exist if brought into existence by something else which already exists. So not everything can fail to exist: something which cannot fail to exist is something which exists necessarily. Anselm and aquinas"s arguments are different but share one crucial feature: they are for the existence of god; they purport to prove that god (conceived in a specific way) exists.