Arguments for God's Existence from Contingency

[datc]

The natural world is everything I've ever experienced, I cannot think of a thing which is not a part of the natural world.

My concluding paragraph reads:

These proofs relied on what I think is an uncontroversial principle that every contingent thing, including an actually imperishable one, must have a cause or perhaps "sufficient reason" which itself is necessary. We have by uniting in God what is diverse in creatures in the end demonstrated God's maximal creative power [as ex nihilo], an aspect of His simplicity [as God is being itself subsisting], His pure actuality, that He is the archetype of all finite things, and His goodness [as having caused the world through neither physical nor teleological causation but through self-diffusion of His goodness into being].

None of these 5 things is a part of the natural world.

[Whateverist]

The natural world is everything I've ever experienced, I cannot think of a thing which is not a part of the natural world.

My concluding paragraph reads:

These proofs relied on what I think is an uncontroversial principle that every contingent thing, including an actually imperishable one, must have a cause or perhaps "sufficient reason" which itself is necessary. We have by uniting in God what is diverse in creatures in the end demonstrated God's maximal creative power [as ex nihilo], an aspect of His simplicity [as God is being itself subsisting], His pure actuality, that He is the archetype of all finite things, and His goodness [as having caused the world through neither physical nor teleological causation but through self-diffusion of His goodness into being].

None of these 5 things is a part of the natural world.

So you subscribe to Plato's view of ideal forms?  So God is the totality of Plato's ideal forms, or is He kind of like a watch maker except he just turns out the ideal forms and those then give rise to the rest?

[brewer]

Yet another guy that thinks he can argue (philosophize) god into existence. Thanks random guy. 

Neo should be here, he cuckoo for Tom Tom.

[datc]

Yet another guy that thinks he can argue (philosophize) god into existence. Thanks random guy. 

Neo should be here, he cuckoo for Tom Tom.

Is it your own philosophical doctrine that God's existence cannot be demonstrated by philosophy?

[bennyboy]

datc, is God a coherent idea at all? Or are you going to look for something mysterious or wonderful, and dub it "God"?

For sure, it's a pretty big mystery why anything exists at all. If you call the philosophical quantity that allows for existence "God," then that's fine. But if you are going to argue that it is sentient, has goals, and watches disapprovingly while Catholic teens masturbate in the shower, then you've gone astray.

[brewer]

Yet another guy that thinks he can argue (philosophize) god into existence. Thanks random guy. 

Neo should be here, he cuckoo for Tom Tom.

Is it your own philosophical doctrine that God's existence cannot be demonstrated by philosophy?

It's not a philosophical doctrine. Have god show up, in my presence, in a manor convincing enough (providing tangible evidence) for me to believe it exists in reality. Not, this must represent god, or that can only be because of god, or here is a proof for god. 

Until that time any argument has about as much impact as a popcorn fart.

[datc]

So God is the totality of Plato's ideal forms, or is He kind of like a watch maker except he just turns out the ideal forms and those then give rise to the rest?

God as Father is an intellect, a subject knowing, whose (ideal) thought as Holy Spirit comprehends Himself as (real) Son, the object known. There is an identity between these three, as well as between them and God's act of self-understanding.

All created things pre-exist in God as ideas that God knows through His own essence. Every possible creature is God shrunk in some precise way into finitude. Since God knows His own perfection, He also knows how it can be participated in by creatures in some sort of likeness of God.

God's essence is supremely knowable in itself but mysterious to us, and abstracta like possible worlds and propositions that humans can grasp in their natural state (as opposed to state of glory while staring at God in heaven directly) hardly exhaust Him.

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datc, is God a coherent idea at all?  Or are you going to look for something mysterious or wonderful, and dub it "God"?

For sure, it's a pretty big mystery why anything exists at all.  If you call the philosophical quantity that allows for existence "God," then that's fine.  But if you are going to argue that it is sentient, has goals, and watches disapprovingly while Catholic teens masturbate in the shower, then you've gone astray.

My methodology is that I build up the idea of God slowly and step by step, one proof after another. At the beginning, there are no assumptions as to what God is at all; in other words, prior to the proofs, the term "God" for me has no meaning.

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It's not a philosophical doctrine. Have god show up, in my presence, in a manor convincing enough (providing tangible evidence) for me to believe it exists in reality. Not, this must represent god, or that can only be because of god, or here is a proof for god.

Perhaps God is so different from creatures that it would be unbecoming for him to just "show up."

In addition, of course, Christ did show up. You are very demanding.

[Cyberman]

How about 666 proofs for "God's" existence?

[datc]

How about 666 proofs for "God's" existence?

There are correct proofs and incorrect ones. I see no advantage in failing to discriminate between them.

[Cyberman]

By what metric can you do that?