A theology text book opens with these words, "We start the study of theology with two presuppositions, namely (1) that God exists, and (2) that He has revealed Himself in His divine word . . . . .For us the existence of God is the great presupposition of theology . . . . This does not mean, however, that the existence of God is capable of a logical demonstration that leaves no room whatever for doubt; but it does mean that, while the truth of God's existence is accepted by faith, this faith is based on reliable information. While Reformed theology regards the existence of God as an entirely reasonable assumption, it does no claim the ability to demonstrate this by rational means." Systematic Theology, Berkhof; Eerdmans, pp. 19-21.

In philosophy, the self-created being (i.e., God) to which every chain of causes must ultimately go back. The term was used by
Greek thinkers and became an underlying assumption in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Many philosophers and theologians in this
tradition have formulated an argument for the existence of God by claiming that the world that man observes with his senses must
have been brought into being by God as the first cause. The classic Christian formulation of this argument came from the
medieval theologian St. Thomas Aquinas, who was influenced by the thought of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.
Aquinas argued that the observable order of causation is not self-explanatory. It can only be accounted for by the existence of a
first cause; this first cause, however, must not be considered simply as the first in a series of continuing causes, but rather as first
cause in the sense of being the cause for the whole series of observable causes.

The 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant rejected the argument from causality because, according to one of his
central theses, causality cannot legitimately be applied beyond the realm of possible experience to a transcendent cause.

Protestantism generally has rejected the validity of the first-cause argument; nevertheless, for most Christians it remains an article
of faith that God is the first cause of all that exists. The person who conceives of God in this way is apt to look upon the
observable world as contingent--i.e., as something that could not exist by itself.

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Perhaps the most celebrated issue in classical metaphysics concerned the existence of God. God in this connection is the name
of "the perfect Being" or "the most real of all things"; the question is whether it is necessary to recognize the existence of such a
being as well as of things that either are or might be objects of everyday experience. A number of famous arguments have been
advanced from the time of the Greeks in favour of the thesis that such a recognition is necessary. The neatest and most ingenious
was the a priori argument of St. Anselm in the 11th century, who said that "that than which nothing greater can be conceived"
must exist in fact as well as in thought, for if it existed only in thought and not in fact, something greater than it could be
conceived, namely the same thing existing in fact. God necessarily exists, because the idea of God is the idea of that than which
nothing greater can be conceived. This is the argument later known as the ontological proof. Relatively few philosophical
theologians, either in the Middle Ages or later, could bring themselves to accept this bold piece of reasoning (although
Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Hegel all accepted it in principle); most preferred to ground their case for God's existence on
premises that claimed to be empirical. Thus, St. Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the most influential Scholastic philosopher, in the 13th
century argued that to explain the fact of motion in the world, the existence of a prime mover must be presupposed; that to
account for contingent or dependent being the existence of something that is necessary or self-contained must be presumed; that
to see why the world is orderly and why the different things in it fit together harmoniously, a situation that might not have
obtained, a Creator who fashioned it on these lines must be postulated--adding in each case "and this all men call God'." These
are versions of the first cause argument and the argument from design, which were to figure prominently in the thinking of later
theistically inclined metaphysicians. (See existence of God, ontological argument, Anselm of Canterbury, Saint, Hegel, Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich, Aquinas, Thomas, Saint, prime mover, first cause, teleological argument.)

The first cause argument should, perhaps, be examined in somewhat greater detail, because it both has an immediate plausibility
and lies at the basis of many different kinds of metaphysical systems (that of Hegel, for example, as well as that of Aquinas). The
argument begins with the innocent-looking statement that something contingent exists; it may be some particular thing, such as
oneself, or it may be the world in general (thus, the description of the proof as being a contingentia mundi, or "from the
contingency of the world"). In describing oneself or the world as contingent, one means only that the thing in question does not
exist through itself alone; it owes its being to the activity of some other thing, as a person owes his being to his parents.
Contingent things are not self-complete; they each demand the existence of something else if they are to be explained. Thus, the
move is made from contingent to necessary being; it is felt that contingent things, of whatever order, cannot be endlessly
dependent on other contingent things but must presuppose a first cause that is self-complete and so exists necessarily. In Hegel
the necessary being is not a separate existent but, as it were, an order of things; the loose facts of everyday life and even of
science are said to point to a system that is all-embracing and in which everything is necessarily what it is. The principle of the
argument, however, is unchanged despite the change in the conclusion. (See contingency.)

Damaging criticism was brought against all the traditional arguments for God's existence by Hume and Kant in the 18th century.
The ontological proof was undermined by the contention that "being is not a real predicate"; existence is not part of the concept
of God in the way in which, for example, being all-powerful is. To say that something exists is not to specify a concept further
but to claim that it has an instance; it cannot be discovered whether a concept has an instance by merely inspecting it. The first
cause argument, it was contended, suffers from two fatal weaknesses. Even if it is correct in its assertion that contingent being
presupposes necessary being, it cannot identify the necessary being in question with God (as happened in each of the Thomistic
proofs) without resurrecting the ontological argument. If it is true, as supporters of the causal proof suppose, that God alone can
answer the description of a necessary being, then whatever exists necessarily is God and whatever is God exists necessarily.
Modern supporters of the causal proof have tried to meet this objection by saying that the equivalence is one of concepts, not of
concept and existent; the existence of a necessary being is already established in the first part of the argument, and the
equivalence in the second part of the argument is between the concept of necessary being and the concept of God. In other
words, they distinguish between existence and essence. In the first part of the argument, the existence of a necessary being is
proved; in the second part of the argument, the essence of that necessary being is identified with what men call God. Beyond this
first contended weakness, however, there are grave difficulties in the move from contingent to necessary existence. Things in the
experienced world are causally related, and some account of this relationship can be given in terms of the temporal relations of
events; causal relations hold primarily between kinds of events, and a cause is, at least, a regular antecedent of a specific kind of
effect. But when an attempt is made to extend the notion of causality from a relationship that holds within experience to one that
connects the experienced world as a whole to something that falls wholly outside it, there is no longer anything firm on which to
hold. The activities of God cannot precede happenings in the world because God is, by definition, not in time; and how the
relationship is to be understood in these circumstances becomes highly problematic. Some metaphysicians, like some recent
theologians, seek to evade the difficulty by saying that God is not the cause of the world but its ground, or again by distinguishing
causes of becoming, which are temporal, from a cause of being, which is not. It is doubtful whether these moves do more than
restate the problem in different terms.

The argument from design is itself a form of causal argument and accordingly suffers from all the difficulties mentioned above,
together with some of its own, as Hume and Kant both point out. Even on its own terms it is wrong to conclude the existence of
a Creator rather than an architect. Furthermore, it infers that the being in question has unlimited powers, when all that the
evidence seems to warrant is that its powers are very great. The argument lost much of its force by the publication of the English
naturalist Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. The unbroken reign of law throughout natural evolution is impressive, but
as a line of reasoning it does not seem to bear close examination.

The metaphysical problem of God's existence is more of an issue today than the problem of universals; there are still thinkers
who hope to restate the old proofs in more convincing ways. The ontological proof, in particular, has won renewed attention
from thinkers such as Norman Malcolm, a philosopher strongly influenced by Wittgenstein, and Charles Hartshorne, an
American Realist whose form of theism is called panentheism (the doctrine of a God who has an unchanging essence but who
completes himself in an advancing experience). Increasingly, however, philosophers of religion are preoccupied not with these
metaphysical abstractions but with the status and force of actual religious claims. "The most real of all things" is no longer at the
centre of their attention: they seek to investigate God as a suitable object for worship.

(See Malcolm, Norman, Hartshorne, Charles, panentheism.)

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The argument for the existence of God inferred from motion was given a more familiar form in the first of the five ways of St.
Thomas Aquinas, five major proofs of God that also owed much to the emphasis on the complete transcendence of God in the
teaching of Plotinus, the leading Neoplatonist of the 3rd century AD, and his followers. (The word that Plotinus used for the
ultimate but mysterious dependence of all things on God is emanation; but this characterization was not understood by him, as it
has been by some later thinkers, as questioning the genuine independent existence of finite things.) In the first way, Aquinas put
forward the view that all movement implies, in the last analysis, an unmoved mover; and though this argument, as he understood
it, presupposes certain views about movement and physical change that may not be accepted today, it does make the main point
that finite processes call for some ground or condition other than themselves. (See cosmological argument, emanationism.)

This becomes more explicit in the second way, which proceeds from the principle that everything must have an "efficient
cause"--i.e., a cause that actively produces and accounts for it--to the notion of a first cause required to avoid an infinite regress,
or tracing of causes endlessly backward. As normally found, the idea of efficient causality, in respect to change and process, has
many difficulties; and some would prefer to speak instead of regular or necessary sequence. But a more serious objection
stresses the apparent inconsistency of thinkers who invoke a general principle of causality and then exempt the alleged first
cause. As the child is apt to put it, "Who then made God?" To this a defender of St. Thomas, or at least of the present approach
to the idea of God, would reply that the first cause is not supposed to be itself a member of any ordinary causal sequence but
altogether beyond it, an infinite reality not itself a part of the natural or temporal order at all. This point, in fact, is what the third
way, starting from the contingency of the world, brings out more explicitly. Nothing explains itself, and all other explanations fall
short of showing in any exhaustive way why anything is as it is, or why there is anything at all. But it is also hard to suppose that
things just happen to be. Nothing could come out of just nothing, and so the course of events as men find and explain them
points to some reality that is not itself to be understood or explained in the normal way at all: it is Explanation with a capital E, as
it were, that is seen to be necessitated by all that there is--of whose nature, however, nothing may be directly discerned beyond
the inevitability of its being as the ultimate or unconditioned ground of all else and in this way transcendent or utterly mysterious in
itself.

This way of thinking of the being and necessity of God has been impressively presented in the mid-20th century by notable
thinkers like Austin Farrer, E.L. Mascall, and H.P. Owen and also by the present writer (see below Bibliography). Generally
known as the cosmological approach to the idea of God, it has much in common with the insistence on the transcendence of
God in recent theology.

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