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How To Argue For God's Existence: Reflections On Hartshorne's Global Argument, Donald W. Viney

Faculty Submissions

Charles Hartshorne challenges the supposed truism that one cannot prove, or at least cannot make a strong rational argument for, the existence of God. Hartshorne makes at least four advances on previous efforts. First, he employs a "global" or multiple argument strategy, also known as a cumulative case, and thus he does not require any single argument to do all the work for theism. Second, he insists that the issue of God's existence is conceptual, not empirical, and thereby he avoids the trap of thinking that God must be a hypothesis in science. Third, he uses position matrices to emphasize …