There are many and various arguments for the existence of God, some of which are easily classifiable, some of which are not so. Usually in order to facilitate performance under exam situations, introductions to the philosophy of religion group such argumentation into easily recognisable groups; but the problem with this is that the arguments lose their individuality, and readers often gloss over important argumentative steps, associating say one cosmological argument with another, and offering criticisms which are really not to the point.
One type of argumentation for the existence of God that I have recently defended (‘Aquinas’s Argument for the Existence of God in De Ente et Essentia, Cap. IV: An Interpretation and Defence’), is what could be called a transcendental argument. This argument performs a metaphysical analysis of entities and holds that such entities display certain characteristics that place them within a nexus of causal dependency. The argument goes on to hold that this nexus of dependency is not self-existing, though it is itself existing, and thus requires some foundational existential principle, which we call God.
It is not the details of this argument on which I want to focus (though if the posts take that trend, then so be it); what I want to focus on is the argument's originality. It argues from the presence of some particular thing to outlining the conditions for the possibility of that thing. Thus, given that x exists, what are the conditions for the possibility of x? In other words, what are those conditions without which a thing could not be? As a type of argumentation for God’s existence, this argument cannot be reduced to the traditional three: cosmological, ontological, and design; and thus I have dubbed it the transcendental argument, taking the term ‘transcendental’ from Kant’s use thereof.
For the purposes of this discussion, I have two questions that may serve to open up the debate: (i) is transcendental argumentation (given that x exists, what are the conditions for the possibility of x?) a valid argumentative procedure?; (ii) if we can discern the conditions for the possibility of a thing's existing, can we thence say that there are certain things or states of affairs that cannot exist?
I'm not yet entirely clear on the argument. Is the idea that we take as a premise the existence of a certain kind of thing, e.g. a university. Then, we consider the necessary conditions under which such a thing could exist, e.g. there have to be persons engaged in learning. Then, we conclude that those conditions obtain, e.g. there are persons engaged in learning?
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