Christians, what is your VERY BEST arguments for the existence of God?

[Rev. Rye]

Ontological Argument, Teleological Arguments, Cosmological Argument and Moral Argument.

I would love to get a response to the ontological argument by an atheist.

Well, here's a response (or a summary thereof) to the Ontological argument by a Theist: Immanuel Kant. His response to the argument has actually effectively destroyed the credibility of the Ontological argument for three hundred years.

The most influential criticism of the ontological argument is that of Immanuel Kant. Kant thought that because the ontological argument rests on the judgement that a God that exists is greater than a God that does not, it rests on a confusion.

According to Kant, existence is not a predicate, a property that a thing can either possess or lack. When people assert that God exists they are not saying that there is a God and he possesses the property of existence. If that were the case, then when people assert that God does not exist they would be saying that there is a God and he lacks the property of existence, i.e., they would be both affirming and denying God’s existence in the same breath. Rather, suggests Kant, to say that something exists is to say that the concept of that thing is exemplified in the world. Existence, then, is not a matter of a thing possessing a property, existence, but of a concept corresponding to something in the world.

To see this more clearly, suppose that we give a complete description of an object, of its size, its weight, its colour, etc. If we then add thatthe same whether it exists or not; it is the same size, the same weight, the same colour, etc. The fact that the object exists, that the concept is exemplified in the world, does not chan the object exists, then in asserting that it exists we add nothing to the concept of the object. The object is ge anything about the concept. To assert that the object exists is to say something about the world, that it contains something that matches that concept; it is not to say anything about the object itself.

If Kant is correct in his view that existence is not a property of objects, then it is impossible to compare a God that exists to a God that does not. On Kant’s view a God that exists and a God that does not are qualitatively identical. A God that exists is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, etc. A God that does not exist is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, etc. Both are the same. If this is right, then Anselm’s claim that an existent God is greater than a non-existent God is false—neither is greater than the other—in which case the ontological argument fails.

This is it.