Ontological Argument Quotes

Metaphysics is a science.

Existence is prior to essence.

How do you prove we exist? Maybe we don't.

Nothing can be produced out of nothing.

Once upon a time, science, philosophy, and theology were disciplines largely undifferentiated from one another, and proving the existence of God was a fairly commonplace intellectual exercise. But as the scientific method became increasingly refined, particularly through the nineteenth century, science and religion grew apart.

There is no philosophy that is not to some extent also theology.

In God alone, essence (what He is) and existence (that he is) coincide.

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.

I was the type who looked at discussions of What Is Truth only with a view toward correcting the manuscript. If you were to quote "I am that I am," for example, I thought that the fundamental problem was where to put the comma, inside the quotation marks or outside.

Whence? wither? why? how? - these questions cover all philosophy.

We cannot start with God and deduce the universe from his existence; we must start with the world as we know it, and deduce God from the world.

The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain.

The proofs of the existence of God are to such an extent fallen into discredit that they pass for something antiquated, belonging to days gone by.

One can study what exists and how consciousness functions; but one cannot analyze (or “prove”) existence as such, or consciousness as such. These are irreducible primaries. (An attempt to “prove” them is self-contradict ory: it is an attempt to “prove” existence by means of nonexistence, and consciousness by means of unconsciousness .)

I'm apt to get drunk on words...Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.

God is that, the greater than which cannot be conceived.

There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself.

Metaphysics, in whatever latitude the term be taken, is a science, or complement of sciences, exclusively occupied with mind.

The principal barrier to a general acceptance of the monist position is that it is counterintuitive.

God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him.

... you could claim that anything's real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody's proved it doesn't exist!

Theology recognizes the contingency of human existence only to derive it from a necessary being, that is, to remove it. Theology makes use of philosophical wonder only for the purpose of motivating an affirmation which ends it. Philosophy, on the other hand, arouses us to what is problematic in our own existence and in that of the world, to such a point that we shall never be cured of searching for a solution.

Nothing can come out of nothing, any more than a thing can go back to nothing.

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

God's existence needs to be established independently before he can be brought into account for causation; it cannot be assumed at the start.