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In the philosophy of religion, an ontological argument is a deductive philosophical argument, made from an ontological basis, that is advanced in support of the existence of God. Such arguments tend to refer to the state of being or existing .
The argument from reason is a transcendental argument against metaphysical naturalism and for the existence of God (or at least a supernatural being that is the source of human reason). The best-known defender of the argument is C. S. Lewis. Lewis first defended the argument at length in his 1947 book, Miracles: A Preliminary Study.
For example, for the fifth Way, Dawkins places it in the same position for his criticism as the watchmaker analogy, when in fact, according to Ward, they are vastly different arguments. Ward defended the utility of the five ways (for instance, on the fourth argument he states that all possible smells must pre-exist in the mind of God, but that ...
The concept of a metaphysically necessary being plays an important role in certain arguments for the existence of God, especially the ontological argument, but metaphysical necessity is also one of the central concepts in late 20th century analytic philosophy.
A rich variety of arguments including forms of the contingency argument, ontological argument, and moral argument have been proposed by philosophers like Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Gödel, and Aquinas for the existence of God throughout history. Arguments for God usually refer to some form of metaphysically or logically necessary maximally ...
Quine's and Putnam's arguments have also been influential outside philosophy of mathematics, inspiring indispensability arguments in other areas of philosophy. For example, David Lewis , who was a student of Quine, used an indispensability argument to argue for modal realism in his 1986 book On the Plurality of Worlds .
Regressive transcendental arguments are more conservative in that they do not purport to make substantive ontological claims about the world. Regressive transcendental arguments take the form of modus tollens with modal operators: If possibly P, then necessarily Q. Actually not Q. Therefore, necessarily not P.
This counter-argument has been questioned by Gettings, [17] who agrees that the axioms might be questioned, but disagrees that Oppy's particular counter-example can be shown from Gödel's axioms. Religious scholar Fr. Robert J. Spitzer accepted Gödel's proof, calling it "an improvement over the Anselmian Ontological Argument (which does not ...