God

A Philosophical Argument from Being

By: Norman Geisler

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

This booklet contains Norm Geisler’s final articulation of his own unique contribution to the cosmological class of arguments for the existence of God. It’s an argument he developed and refined over sixty years (1956 to 2015). Drawing from pools deeper and more ancient than those used by philosophers in the Age of Enlightenment, he is not trying to rescue any of the standard textbook arguments from their standard textbook criticisms. This is not, for example, a revamping of Leibniz’s famous contingency argument. Instead, he presents an ancient argument with new insights. While unmistakably Thomistic in tone, this is not simply an expansion of Thomas Aquinas’s famous “third way.” Taking his cues from Aquinas’s De Ente et Essentia (On Being and Essence), Geisler pierces to the underlying substrate of Aquinas’s five ways to get to the most fundamental starting point of all—Being itself. In so doing, he forges a new pathway to a largely forgotten frontier where the reason of contingent beings is confronted by that which we call God. The argument is first summarized in a seven-point outline and then expanded into an eighteen-point form. Short expositions for each point are offered and terms are defined. The conclusion only leaves room for the God of classical theism—the God of Gen. 1:1, Ex. 3:14, Acts 17:24-25, Col. 1:17, and Rev. 4:8.