The Devil's Advocate
Cogito 3 (3):193-207 (1989)
| Abstract | Over the centuries, many different arguments have been used to support the belief in God. These range from the abstruse and theoretical, such as Anselm’s famous Ontological Argument, to the relatively downto-earth and practical, such as Pascal’s Wager; but nearly all of them share a common weakness on which I intend to focus. I shall claim that the theistic arguments typically take for granted that in order to establish the existence of God they have only to establish the existence of a Supreme Being. They thus presuppose that for the office of Lord of the Universe, God as traditionally understood by Christians is the only candidate worth considering, and as a result they give insufficient attention to the nature of the Supreme Being whose existence they supposedly prove. | |||||||||
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