Deus ex machina

In some of the recent articles on this blog, we tackled the structure of logic, the nature of truth, and the meaning of existence. With these beginner topics sorted out, we can now talk about God.St. Michael Triumphs over the Devil, Bartolomé Bermejo (1468), detail #1.Rest assured, I’m not going to guilt you into going to church. Instead, we’ll talk about an ancient philosophical frontier: the efforts to use reason to prove the existence of God. These proofs are commonly lampooned by atheists, but little effort is made to represent the arguments, ahem, faithfully.We’ll focus on the arguments for and not against because to get rid of God, you seemingly only need to embrace scientific materialism. The hard version of it has no room for otherworldly beings; the soft variant may be indifferent to supernatural entities, but denies them them opportunity to interact with matter. Well — it’s not actually so simple, but we’ll get back to that in a while.Arguments from designThe most familiar…