How Good are the Arguments for God?
Generally, the best any philosophical argument can do is prove its conclusion given background assumptions. Very few arguments in philosophy prove anything significant from assumptions everybody agrees on. This is neither surprising nor alarming as there are people (philosophers especially) who deny what seem to be the otherwise safest, most obvious assumptions – for example, that there is a world outside our minds, that the past is real, that things have essences, that change occurs, etc.
Arguments for God are no different, though I suggest the assumptions required for rational demonstration of divinity are about as reasonable as one can get. Some of these assumptions include the notion that being, or reality, is understandable. That there are, in fact, essences (humans, dogs, electrons, etc.). That causation occurs. That some things are contingent (are but don’t have to be). And so on. Again, these assumptions are not only reasonable, they are, I believe, at the end of the day, undeniable. Nevertheless, determined skeptics will deny them, especially if they are caught up in the argumentative stream and desperate to avoid what seems to them the inevitable conclusion.
This leads us to admit that probably no argument in philosophy is rationally compelling such that one must, absolutely, accept the conclusion it generates. There is always something someone can deny along the way, however extreme. Rather, an argument should be judged by how solidly it delivers its conclusion nested within its assumptions, and the safer and more reasonable the assumptions, the better the argument, so far as I can tell.
Seen from this perspective, I believe traditional arguments for God are about as good as anything we can expect from philosophy. While there are often controversial metaphysical systems used to explicate the divine nature, actually arguing to the fact that reality includes (at least one) divine nature requires only some very modest assumptions.1
To give a brief example. If certain arguments for God launch from the notion of contingency – that is, that certain things exist but need not exist – and somebody denies the world contains any contingent beings, then those arguments for God lose immediate traction. That said, contingency is about as obvious a notion as there can be. In fact, contingency is such an obvious notion that many skeptics reject arguments for God precisely because they believe the theistic conclusion would eliminate contingency (an objection known as modal collapse; we’ve been through that before).
Perhaps another way to adduce the strength of an argument is to see if escaping the conclusion would force someone into adopting some otherwise radical thesis (that there is no causation) or denying some otherwise obvious aspect of reality (like contingency). From what I can tell, the moment a skeptic begins pulling maneuvers like those, just to escape the affirmation of God, it is like the Jiu Jitsu player who, to avoid being caught in guard, throws themselves into a rear naked choke.
Perhaps even just the assumption of contingency is enough to give one certainty of God’s existence.