Ontological, Cosmological and Design Arguments

Abstract

By the religious ambiguity of the universe I do not mean that it has no definite character but that it is capable from our present human vantage point of being thought and experienced in both religious and naturalistic ways. This ambiguity has only become widely evident since the rise of modern science in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From the beginnings of human life to the spiritual ferment of the axial period, and through the more settled ‘ages of faith’, the reality of the transcendent was accepted as manifest fact, unquestioned except by an occasional boldly sceptical philosopher. The immanence of the divine was daily experienced in the organic unity of life, the regular procession of the seasons, the rage of storm and earthquake, the still beauty of a lake, the terror of eerie places, and its power was felt as benign or threatening in prosperity and calamity, health and sickness, fertility and sterility, victory and defeat. Or again, the one God who had spoken through the Torah or through Christ or through the Qur’an was a given reality whose presence was daily confirmed in personal prayer and public liturgy, manifest both in the usages of language and in the structure of society, celebrated in painting, sculpture, architecture and music, and lived out in the great public festivals.

All proofs or disproofs that we tender

Of His existence are returned

Unopened to the sender.

W. H. Auden