Existence of God

Locke holds God's existence to be one of the few demonstrable truths: from our own existence he infers, by causal reasoning, an eternal, all-powerful, intelligent being. This Christian theism underpins his ethics (natural law is the divine will) and his politics (natural rights come from the Creator).

Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV, ch. 10 (the demonstration of God's existence)

Marcus affirms providential gods identified with the immanent reason of the cosmos, a pantheist rather than personal theism. The « or else atoms » hypothesis he always keeps open does not overturn this conviction but strips it of any dogmatic claim: he believes in providence without being able to prove it.

Meditations, II, 11 · Meditations, XII, 28 · Meditations, VI, 44

The Timaeus presents a Demiurge, a good craftsman-god who orders the world by looking to the Forms as models; the Laws assert the existence of gods and providence against atheism. This rational, impersonal theism, with no creation ex nihilo and no single God in the monotheist sense, holds the score back from the extreme.

Timaeus, 28a-30c · Laws, X, 885b-907d

Plotinus's whole metaphysics culminates in a single, absolute principle, the One, source of all that is and term of the soul's return: a first divine principle exists, and atheism is beside the point. But this principle is not the personal, creating God of monotheism: it is impersonal, "beyond being", does not know, does not will, does not create by decision but overflows by the necessity of its superabundance. This metaphysical theism, without personal providence or creation ex nihilo, holds the score back from the extreme while remaining firmly on the side of affirming a divine absolute.

Enneads, VI, 9 · Enneads, V, 1 (On the Three Primary Hypostases)

God is not a personal being separate from the world but the immanent reason that orders the whole, identifiable with fate, providence and nature. A Stoic pantheist theism, affirming a providential divinity while merging it with the order of the world.

Natural Questions, II, 45 (the names of God: fate, providence, nature) · Letters to Lucilius, XLI (God is near you, within you)

Śaṅkara distinguishes two levels of the absolute: a personal God, creator and object of devotion (saguṇa brahman, Īśvara), real at the empirical level, and, at the ultimate level, a brahman without attributes (nirguṇa), beyond all personhood and all relation. With respect to our axis this is not an atheism: the absolute is indeed the ground of everything. But neither is it the theism of a sovereign creator distinct from the world, for the personal God is himself a conventional figure that ultimate knowledge passes through. The tension between devotion and liberating knowledge is thus dissolved by the hierarchy of the two truths: God for the one who journeys, the impersonal for the one who knows, hence a theist but restrained position.

Commentary on the Brahma Sūtras, I.1 · Commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā

Charged with impiety, Socrates replies that he believes in the gods more than his accusers do, and invokes the daimonion, the divine sign that turns him away from acting wrongly. But his piety reforms civic religion: a god, being good, can be the author of no evil, which condemns the Homeric tales of quarrelsome, deceitful gods. Theism, then, but moralized and rational, remote enough from ordinary worship to have been taken for unbelief.

Plato, Apology, 26b-28a, 35d (belief in the gods) · Plato, Euthyphro, 6a-c (critique of the immoral myths)

God exists necessarily, but is not the personal, transcendent God of classical theism: it is the single, infinite substance, identical with Nature (pantheism). Lacking providence or anthropomorphic will, this God is so remote from ordinary theism that Spinoza was charged with atheism; hence an intermediate value on the theist side, affirming a God while flagging its impersonal nature.

Ethics, I, prop. 11 (God necessarily exists) · Ethics, I, props. 14-15 (single substance)

Since all knowledge is bounded to phenomena, God, who is not one, escapes proof: Kant dismantles the proofs of God's existence one by one (ontological, cosmological, physico-theological), the first failing in its leap from concept to existence. Yet what is barred to knowledge is required by morality: without God and immortality, the accord of virtue and happiness (the highest good) would stay unthinkable. God thus returns as a postulate of practical reason, an object of rational faith and not of knowledge, which warrants a moderate rather than an assertive theism.

Critique of Pure Reason, "Transcendental Ideal" · Critique of Practical Reason, Dialectic

Lucretius does not deny that the gods exist: made of subtle atoms, they lead an immortal and perfectly peaceful life in the intermundia, with no care for ours. But he draws a radical consequence: a blessed being has neither anger nor favour, so no providence governs the world, no god made it or rewards and punishes. The proof lies in the very spectacle of nature, too full of flaws to be the work of a divine power. This position is therefore not atheism, of which he was accused, but a theology without providence: the gods neither create nor govern anything, and its edge is polemical: so much wrong could religion prompt, it is religion, not impiety, that is the true evil to be fought.

On the Nature of Things, I, 62-101 (religion as source of crimes, the sacrifice of Iphigenia) · On the Nature of Things, V, 146-234 (the gods of the intermundia; the world too flawed to be divine)

Epicurus starts from the common preconception of the gods as blessed and incorruptible beings, and takes it seriously to the end: a perfectly happy being knows neither anger nor favour, for the care and toil of governing a world would betray a need, hence an imperfection. It follows that the gods, set apart in the intermundia, exercise no providence and dispense neither reward nor punishment: popular piety, which pictures them jealous and vengeful, is the real impiety. This theology is therefore not a covert atheism, of which he was accused, but a therapeutic strategy, the first remedy of the tetrapharmakos, which removes the ground of the fear of the gods.

Letter to Menoeceus, 123-124 (the blessed gods, unconcerned with men) · Principal Doctrines, I (the blessed and incorruptible being knows neither trouble nor anger)

Platonism posits an ordering divine principle: the Demiurge (the divine craftsman of the Timaeus who orders the world after the model of the Forms) of the Timaeus shapes the world after the model of the Forms, and Plotinus' One is the source from which all proceeds. This theistic orientation, not that of a personal god in Plato, prepares the Christian theology of Augustine.

Plato, Timaeus, 28a-30c, the Demiurge · Plotinus, Enneads, V, 1-2; Augustine, Confessions, VII

Bacon professes a sincere Christian faith and holds God's existence to be assured: it is, he argues, shallow philosophy that inclines to atheism, while a deeper knowledge of nature brings the mind back to religion, for the order of the world points to its author. Theism is never put in question, even though Bacon keeps it outside the field of scientific inquiry.

Essays, "Of Atheism"

Stoicism is theistic, but with a pantheist theism: god is not a transcendent person but is identified with the logos, the seminal reason and providence that pervades and animates the whole cosmos. Zeno and Cleanthes, in the Hymn to Zeus, celebrate this immanent divinity that orders all things.

Cleanthes, Hymn to Zeus · Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, book II

Aristotelianism affirms a divine principle, the unmoved mover, the final cause of the universe's motion, which it moves as the beloved moves the lover. Yet Aristotle's god is impersonal: pure thought thinking itself, it is neither creator nor providence and takes no concern for the world. Hence a clearly non-extreme theist position that marks this impersonality, before scholasticism identified it, not without tension, with the personal and providential God.

Aristotle, Metaphysics, Λ (book XII), 7 and 9

Aristotle demonstrates the existence of a first unmoved mover, pure actuality and final cause that moves the world as the beloved moves the lover, without being moved. This is a form of theism, but of an impersonal god that does not create, exercises no providence and does not know particulars, hence a value held well back from the extreme.

Metaphysics, XII (Lambda).7 and 9 · Physics, VIII.6

The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar affirms a God, author of an order of the world that the heart recognizes, and the immortality of the soul. But this theism is that of a natural religion, or deism: Rousseau rejects the proofs of theology as well as revealed dogmas, and parts clearly from the atheist materialism of a d'Holbach.

Rousseau, Emile, Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar

Romanticism does not deny the divine, it displaces it: against the remote God and the mechanism of the Enlightenment, it finds it immanent in living nature, in the infinite and in feeling. From the revival of Spinoza to Schelling's Naturphilosophie and Wordsworth's divinized nature, the sacred pervades the world more than it overhangs it: a diffuse pantheism rather than an orthodox theism or an atheism.

Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature · Wordsworth, The Prelude

An absolute that is being-consciousness-bliss without a second can, strictly, receive no determination: to qualify it ("creator," "good," "personal") is to set it against something else, hence to limit it. From this Advaita draws its decisive distinction of two registers: on the ultimate plane (pāramārthika), the absolute is without attributes (nirguṇa brahman), beyond all qualification; on the conventional plane (vyāvahārika), that same absolute, seen through māyā, appears as a personal, creator God (saguṇa brahman, Īśvara), a legitimate object of devotion. This is therefore neither atheism, which would deny the absolute, nor classical personal theism, which would make it the final term: against Rāmānuja and the devotional schools, Advaita subordinates the personal God to an impersonal absolute of which it is only the conventional figure.

Śaṅkara, Commentary on the Brahma-Sūtras (Brahma-Sūtra-Bhāṣya), I, 1 · Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad

Hegel affirms God, but as Spirit that knows itself, not as the transcendent, personal creator of classical theism: religion and philosophy have the same content, which the former represents and the latter thinks. This God, thus rethought, was read both as the Christian God (Right Hegelians) and as divinized humanity (Left Hegelians, among them Feuerbach and Marx): the debate over his theism remains open.

Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §1 and §573 · Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (Lectures)

A sincere Catholic, submissive to the Church, Montaigne never doubts the existence of God and dies in the faith of his fathers. But this declared theism comes with an avowal of reason's impotence: we can know nothing of God, neither prove nor conceive him, and what we say of him belongs to usage and revelation, not to knowledge. Hence a theism held by faith and custom more than by proof, which keeps the score back from the extreme on the side of affirmation.

Essays, II, 12, "Apology for Raymond Sebond"

In A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God, Peirce holds that the mind's free reverie, musement, leads naturally to the hypothesis of God as to the finest of abductions, a fruitful hypothesis rather than a demonstrated dogma. Peirce's God is less the personal God of the religions than an ordering reality correlated with his growing cosmos, hence a theism real but restrained, with no extreme.

A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God (1908)

The reasoning starts from the notion all men form of the divine, the preconception (prolēpsis) of a being blessed and imperishable. But one who is perfectly happy has neither needs nor cares: such a being can know neither anger nor favor, for anger and benevolence are marks of weakness. To govern the world, heed prayers and punish faults would be so many disturbances unworthy of bliss: the gods therefore exist, made of atoms and lodged in the spaces between worlds, yet wholly detached from us. Epicurus thus inverts ordinary piety, which fears the gods and flatters them, and cuts off Stoic providence: he keeps theism while emptying it of all intervention, which removes the first of the fears.

Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, 123-124 · Epicurus, Principal Doctrines, I

The indeterminacy of all things extends to the divine: since neither the existence nor the non-existence of the gods can be established, the sage does not decide. This suspension is more radical than agnosticism, which asserts undecidability as a thesis, since Pyrrho does not even posit that the divine is unknowable. In practice, following the custom of his city, he honors the gods like everyone else, without attaching dogmatic belief to it. It is this lived suspension, and not a position of balance between faith and atheism, that the median value marks here.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, IX, 64 and 108 · Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, III, 2 (on the gods)

Camus resolutely thinks a world without God: the absurd presupposes precisely that no transcendence guarantees meaning. His atheism nevertheless stays free of militant dogmatism, attentive to the scandal of evil more than to any metaphysical proof, hence a strong but not absolute score.

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) · The Plague (1947), Paneloux's sermon

Marx's atheism does not stop at denying God: it asks why humans need one. Religion is neither a mere error nor a priestly imposture, but at once the expression of real distress and the protest against it, an imaginary consolation that relieves suffering while making it bearable, and so lasting. Hence the decisive shift: to criticize heaven is useless unless one criticizes earth, that is, the social relations that make religion necessary. Abolishing the illusion presupposes abolishing the conditions that call for it, which ranges Marxism on the side of atheist materialism.

Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, introduction (1844)

Bentham's morality is wholly secular: good and evil are settled by the sole calculus of pleasures and pains, with no recourse to a divine will. Under the pen name Philip Beauchamp he published a critique of the usefulness of natural religion, and his analysis of the theological principle of antipathy rejects religious sanction as a moral foundation. The leaning is markedly anti-religious and critical, without an explicitly systematized metaphysical atheism.

Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind (as Philip Beauchamp) · An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. II (the theological principle reducible to the others)

An heir of Buddhism, Nāgārjuna acknowledges no creator God: his critique of any production by a cause with inherent existence undercuts in advance the idea of a self-positing first principle. Liberation comes from no grace but from understanding emptiness (śūnyatā). This is a non-theism, held without militant polemic against belief.

Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way), ch. I (the examination of conditions, against a self-sufficient cause)

A being itself subject to becoming and suffering cannot be the source of salvation: this is why Buddhism is non-theist. Deities (devas) do populate the cosmology, but they are caught in the cycle of rebirth and hence powerless to liberate, and a creator God would not account for the suffering he would have brought into being. Against Brahmanical theism, liberation therefore depends on no grace but on one's own effort and understanding; this absence of a creator is held serenely, without militant polemic against belief.

Brahmajāla Sutta (the discourse on the all-embracing net) · Aggañña Sutta (the discourse on origins)

In the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume dismantles the argument from design: the order of the world warrants no secure inference to an infinite, wise and good creator, above all given evil. Without professing firm atheism (he allows a vague cause or causes of order), he empties theism of any determinate content: the position leans clearly toward agnosticism and atheism.

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (esp. parts V, VIII and XI) · The Natural History of Religion

The ground of morality is wholly secular: utility, not divine will, measures the good. Bentham, frankly irreligious, attacks the religiously rooted principle of asceticism, and Mill keeps a cautious agnosticism. The movement shifts the source of moral obligation from heaven to earthly welfare, without erecting atheism into a dogma.

Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, chapter 2 · Mill, Three Essays on Religion

Diogenes professes no theoretical atheism but a practical irreligion: he mocks rites, mysteries and oracles, and holds the city's religious beliefs and fears to be vain. Seeing the votive offerings of shipwreck survivors, he remarked that they would be far more numerous if those who had perished had dedicated theirs too. Indifferent to the gods of cult, he reduces the divine to nature and to virtue, which sets him apart from theism without making him a militant atheist.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI, 24, 42 and 59

Raised without religion, Mill examines the question of God in terms of empirical proof: the argument from design makes at most probable a creator of limited power and goodness, never an omnipotent God compatible with the world's evil. This agnosticism, which allows only a faint hope of an afterlife, places him slightly on the side of unbelief.

Three Essays on Religion (posthumous, 1874), Theism

The Cynics profess no theoretical atheism, but a practical irreligion: Diogenes mocks the rites, the mysteries and the oracles, and holds the city's religious beliefs and fears to be vain. Indifferent to the gods of cult, they reduce the divine to virtue and to nature, which sets them clearly apart from theism without making them militant atheists.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI