The existence of God is very important to religious people. Well, I suppose that Buddhists do not really worry about proving the existence of God. If there is a God (or Gods, depending on your persuasion), we should be able to demonstrate the God’s existence. This demonstration if often the beginning point in the defense or attack of a person’s belief. If I am going to argue about what an ocean is like, all that I might say is meaningless if there is in fact, no ocean. There are several ways to go about doing this. The most common in the Western religious tradition are:

• the Cosmological Argument,
• the Ontological Argument,
• the Teleological Argument,
• the Argument from Religious Experience,
• the Argument from Miracles, and
• Pascal’s Wager.

There are scores of others, including Pruss’s argument from Altruism:”The Unsound Argument(“Altruism, Teleology and God” by A. R. Pruss Part I)”:http://unsoundargument.com/ethics/altruism-and-teleology-i, but the above are the classic ones. There are some that say Pascal’s Wager is not really a proof of God’s existence, but an attempt to justify belief in the unproven. In the coming weeks I will be evaluating each.