INTRO PHILOSOPHY

· Augustine (354-430 A.D.), the greatest thinker of early Western Christianity developed "proofs for the existence of God as commentaries upon Scripture.

· He based his arguments upon the Biblical account of creation out of nothing, and the soul's search for God.

· Citing Romans (1:18-25) Augustine said that only with the exception of an excessively depraved few, the whole human race confesses God to be the author of the world". He points out that even a man accepting many gods, conceives a supreme God- 'the one God of gods' as 'something than which nothing more excellent or sublime exists."'

· St. Augustine believed that the very nature of the universe and the creatures living in it prove the supreme goodness of God and that there is ONE God..

· He wrote that ”the order and unity of Nature proclaims the unity of the Creator ,

· just as the goodness of creatures, their positive reality, reveals the goodness of God

· and the order and stability of the universe manifest the wisdom of God .

· On the other hand, God, as the self-existent, eternal and immutable Being, is infinite, and, as infinite, incomprehensible. God is His own Perfection, is 'simple', so that His wisdom and knowledge, His goodness and power, therefore, transcends space in virtue of His spirituality and infinity and simplicity, as He transcends time in virtue of His eternity ...2

· Thus Augustine relied upon the universe-the creation of God to prove that God is One, Good, and Wise Supreme Creator

· At the same time, he calls God Self evident-needs no evidence or proof and says that God stands above Time and Space.

· Thus St. Augustine established the transcendence of God as Creator.

· Yet he spoke of God in personal terms, rather than as a philosophical concept, because in those early days of Christianity, faith was supreme and very few challenged God’s existence.

· He was "not so much concerned to prove to the atheist that God exists as to show how all creation proclaims the God whom the soul can experience in itself, the living God. It was the dynamic attitude of the soul towards God which interested him, not the construction of dialectical arguments with a purely theoretical conclusion."