Philosophical theism

Plato, an early proponent of philosophical theism.

Kurt Gödel, “established, beyond comparison, as the most important logician of our times,” in the words of Solomon Feferman (Feferman 1986), founded the modern, metamathematical era in mathematical logic

Bust of Socrates in the Vatican Museum.

Philosophical theism is the belief that God exists (or must exist) independent of the teaching or revelation of any particular religion. It represents belief in a personal God entirely without doctrine. Some philosophical theists are persuaded of God's existence by philosophical arguments, while others consider themselves to have a religious faith that need not be, or could not be, supported by rational argument.

Philosophical theism has parallels with the 18th century philosophical view called Deism.

“Philosophical theism” is sometimes also used as a synonym for classical theism.

Relationship to organized religion

Philosophical theism conceives of nature as the result of purposive activity and so as an intelligible system open to human understanding, although possibly never completely understandable. It implies the belief that nature is ordered according to some sort of consistent plan and manifests a single purpose or intention, however incomprehensible or inexplicable. However, philosophical theists do not endorse or adhere to the theology or doctrines of any organized religion or church. They may accept arguments or observations about the existence of God advanced by theologians working in some religious tradition, but reject the tradition itself. (For example, a philosophical theist might believe certain Christian arguments about God while nevertheless rejecting Christianity.)

Notable philosophical theists

• Socrates (469-399 B.C.) was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher, he's the earliest known proponent of the teleological argument
• Plato (428-347 BC), a student of the Athenian sage Socrates, provided early medieval Christianity with a philosophical paradigm and is widely acknowledged as the father of Western philosophy.
• Aristotle (384-322 BC) founded what are currently known as the "cosmological arguments" for a God (or "first cause").
• Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC) was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist.
• Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) was a French philosopher
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was an important German polymath, regarded as the father of digital computing. Although Leibniz embraced Christianity, as a philosopher he argued for the existence of God on purely philosophical grounds.Leibniz wrote: "Even by supposing the world to be eternal, the recourse to an ultimate cause of the universe beyond this world, that is, to God, cannot be avoided."
• Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was a German philosopher
• Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was an American Founding Father who was the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence, although he was a Unitarian, he argued for God's existence on teleological grounds without appeal to revelation.
• Georg W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) was a German philosopher
• Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) was a British naturalist, biologist and co-discoverer of natural selection. Wallace later began to doubt his own theory of natural selection and advocated a teleological form of evolution, in a letter to James Marchant he wrote "The completely materialistic mind of my youth and early manhood has been slowly molded into the socialistic, spiritualistic, and theistic mind I now exhibit"
• Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist who sketches, for God's reality, an argument to a hypothesis of God as the Necessary Being
• Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) was a philosopher and non-theologian who found that following through on the development of an innovative philosophy led to the inclusion of God in the system.
• Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) was a Spanish philosopher
• Ralph Barton Perry (1876-1957) was an American philosopher
• Edgar Brightman (1884-1953) was an American philosopher and minister
• Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) was the preeminent mathematical logician of the twentieth century who described his theistic belief as independent of theology, he also composed a formal argument for God's existence known as Gödel's ontological proof.
• Martin Gardner(1914-2010) was a mathematics and science writer who defended philosophical theism and was actively hostile to some religious traditions because of their belief that God has performed miracles or revelations. Gardner believed that many liberal Protestant preachers, such as Harry Emerson Fosdick and Norman Vincent Peale, were really philosophical theists without admitting (or realizing) the fact.
• Antony Flew (1923-2010) was an atheist philosopher who converted to philosophical theism on the basis of scientific discoveries and related reasoning, which had convinced him that there is an intelligent designer of the natural universe

See also

• Freethought