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Here's an interview with Ed Feser, author of Five Proofs of the Existence of God: Feser's presentation of the 'Aristotelian' proof is well done.

Adams writes "to refute two...objections to the doctrine of divine necessity" (742). In doing so, he provides a refutation for evolutionary naturalism and an argument for the existence of God. Obj #1: The proposition, 'God exists', cannot be a necessary truth because only analytic truths can be necessary truths but existential propositions cannot be analytic truths. 'God exists' is an existential proposition. Therefore, 'God exists' cannot be a necessary truth. Why think analytic propositions cannot be existential propositions? An analytic proposition is a conditional the consequent of which is a correct analysis of the antecedent. For example, the proposition 'if he is a bachelor, then he is unmarried' (or 'all bachelors are unmarried') is an analytic proposition. Due to their conditional nature, analytic propositions do not imply existence. 'If he is a bachelor, then he is unmarried' is true even if there are no bachel...

Plain Theism is the view that ‘God exists’ is a logically contingent proposition. ‘God exists’ is neither necessarily true nor necessarily false. In contrast, necessitarian theism holds that the proposition, ‘God exists’ is necessarily true. In other words ‘it is false that God exists’ is a contradiction. I often wondered what would motivate my old prof, Keith Yandell to hold to plain theism. What does it mean to say that God does not have necessary existence or that ‘necessarily, God exists’ is necessarily false? Most theists contend that if ‘God exists’ is true, it is true necessarily. The answer, I think, lies in some of Dr. Yandell’s theistic argumentation. In his excellent introduction to the philosophy of religion, Dr. Yandell carves out an extended version of the cosmological argument. In this argument, he teases out an assumption that works for the argument but entails plain theism. Due to the length of the argument, let me present a ‘supplemental’ argument for the conc...

Mathematician, Pierre-Simon LaPlace was once asked by the emperor of France where God was to feature in LaPlace's mathematical system. LaPlace replied, "I have no need of that hypothesis." The idea behind the quip is that if you can find a good explanations for something without God, then you don't need him. And if you don't need him, then this is good reason to suppose that he's not there. The kind of God supposed in such thought is the "God-of-the-gaps" kind of God, a God who is necessary only in so far that he explains some feature of the world - existence, the movement of the planets, the habits of our species, or the events of history. No Gaps, No God. The trouble is: there is no such God. If God exists, he would not be such a being as to only involve himself where he was needed. Instead, God would be involved in everything - responsible for the workings of all the laws of nature not merely for the ones that need a divine hand. Seco...

You couldn't believe in something unless you knew something about it. If I said to you that a meroganon lives at the end of my street you might say I am nuts, but you would first want to know something about a meroganon. You couldn't know if I am nuts unless you knew something about a meroganon. I could describe one to you by listing some of its basic features. After some time you would have in your mind the concept of a meroganon and you could then be justified in thinking that I have lost my mind. Consider the person (there may be more than one) who has not read this blog. That person does not even know the name, 'meroganon'. The person does not have a concept of a meroganon and so does not believe in a meroganon. I don't know much science. There are probably many entities that some people have concepts for and that I do not. I couldn't have a positive belief about the existence of any of these entities unless I had a concept of them. It follows that to ...

When two people talk about something they assume there is something to talk about and that they have the necessary means (reason, language, shared experience etc) to talk about it. It does not strike us as odd that this is possible; we take it for granted.  Friedrich Nietzsche, on the other hand, did not.  Nietzsche  famously describes a scene in which a madman proclaims the death of God. And if God is dead, says Nietzsche, we can no longer assume that what we are talking about makes any sense at all. Why? because if there is no ultimate explanation for everything, there is  no  explanation for anything. And if there is no explanation, talk cannot get anywhere. If God is dead, Nietzsche says, we are all madmen. Should we go home and forget about it? No. What we can do instead, argues Nietzsche, is construct sense, create our own world for our own purposes. It is madness, yes, but if God is dead, it is our only option.  Whatever one ...

J.P Moreland argues that irreducible human consciousness provides compelling evidence for the existence of God. Moreland argues that naturalists ignore much of the background evidence for theism. Philosophical argument is favorable to theism, but these kinds of arguments are not forcing naturalists to raise the background probability of theism. Given the high probability of theism, the probability of consciousness being a mental property or substance is much higher (a theistic ontology admits mental substances/properties). On the other hand, given naturalism, the probability of mental properties is greatly diminished. To postulate mental properties on a physicalist ontology appears ad hoc and implausible.

Charles Darwin once said: "the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God; but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide" (full transcript here ). It strikes me that if such a clever fellow such as Darwin cannot decide if the most convincing argument for the existence of God is valid, then the rest of us mere average intellects have no chance. It points to a problem of proof and persuasion  Just because there is a logically valid, sound argument for the existence of God doesn't mean one has proven God nor that everyone would be persuaded by it. The question, then, is why not? And why does the same argument have a positive result in one person and yet the opposite effect on another? Perhaps the most interesting part about Darwin's statement is that he neither accepts or rejects the argument - he says...