Argument
Transcendental argument for the existence of God
Overview
The Transcendental Argument for the existence of God (TAG) is a transcendental argument that attempts to prove the existence of God.
Several distinct arguments are supposed transcendental arguments for God:
1) A version was formulated by Immanuel Kant in his 1763 work The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God and the Critique of Practical Reason. For Kant, morality is best explained by the existence of God.
2) C. S. Lewis's argument from reason is also a kind of transcendental argument.
3) The term is also used by Christian presuppositional apologetics and the likes of Cornelius Van Til and Greg Bahnsen, which attempt to appeal to God as the necessary condition for the possibility of experience and knowledge.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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It is framed in the following manner: If something exists, an absolutely necessary being must likewise exist. Now I, at least, exist. Consequently, there exists an absolutely necessary being. The minor contains an experience, the major reasons from a general experience to the existence of a necessary being.[68] Thus this argument really begins at experience, and is not completely à priori, or ontological. The object…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
States what Transcendental argument for the existence of God is; the author is tied to Transcendental argument for the existence of God in the knowledge graph.
The latter he accepts as it came from the hands of Descartes, but insists that it requires an added argument before it ranks as anything more than presumptive proof. The Anselmic-Cartesian argument, as stated by Leibniz, is as follows: "God is defined as the greatest, or most perfect, of beings, or as a being of supreme grandeur and perfection. But in the notion of a perfect being, existence must be included, since…
John Dewey, Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding
States what Transcendental argument for the existence of God is.
In the second part, however, when Kant examines the _application,_ as it is called, which Reason makes of the categories in order to know its objects, the content of the categories, at least in some points of view, comes in for discussion: or, at any rate, an opportunity presented itself for a discussion of the question. It is worth while to see what decision Kant arrives at on the subject of metaphysic, as this…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
States what Transcendental argument for the existence of God is.
Related ideas
- Argument
- Immanuel Kant
- Atheism
- Subjunctive possibility
- Peter van Inwagen
- Necessity and sufficiency
- Ash'arism
- Materialism
- Argument from morality
- Platonism
- Knowledge
- Experience
- William Lane Craig
- Transcendence (religion)
- Quran
- Morality
- Abstract and concrete
- Christianity
- C. S. Lewis
- Critique of Practical Reason
- Existence of God
- Affirming the consequent
- Concept
- Michael Lou Martin
Place in the tradition
Part of Fideism.
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