There is no God

9. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 –1900).

10. Robert Spitzer (b. 1952),

11. Richard Dawkins (b. 1941)

Socrates(c. 470 BC - 399 BC)and Plato (c.428-347 B.C.) believed in many gods, as did all Greeks, not in only one god. These two philosophers are presented together because Socrates never put his thoughts down on paper. Instead, they are recorded in the dialogues of his student Plato, but we really do not know whose thoughts are whose. In Plato's Laws, he sets out two sides of a god: one for good and the other for evil. Read also his Euthyphro, a discussion that occurs in the weeks before the trial of Socrates (399 BC), between Socrates and Euthyphro. The dialogue covers subjects such as the meaning of piety and justice. To better defend himself in an upcoming trial for impiety, Socrates asks for a definition of piety (holiness) from Euthyphro, who is prosecuting for murder his father, who had killed a slave. Euthyphro offers Socrates four definitions. (i) what he is doing now, prosecuting his father; (ii) piety is what is pleasing to the gods; (ii) Socrates responds with "Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious? Or is it pious because it is loved by the gods? Which causes Euthyphro to answer (iii) "What all the gods love is pious, and what they all hate is impious; (iv) Euthyphro 's final definition is : "Piety is an art of sacrifice and prayer.

Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC)describes, in his Metaphysics, the unmoved mover as being responsible for the movement of the stars. This is a version of the often-repeated argument that someone, i.e, a god, had to create the world, the universe, and us.

St Augustine (354 – 430 AD) was bishop of Hippo in Algeria. He held that since God's governance is the universe which comprises a vast multitude of relatively independent individuals differing in nature, function, and end, a single supreme being is needed for continuous and unifying control.

St. Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274), an Italian and a Dominican friar, elaborated on the unmoved mover in five ways in his Summa Theologica. These are (i) there has to be a first cause – essentially the same argument as that of Aristotle (ii) the arguments from motion (there has to be a principal moving cause), (iii) from contingency (what it takes for the universe to exist must transcend both space and time), (iv) from degree (everything has a greater and a less degree of goodness, truth, nobility, and the like, and (v) the ultimate in all these is God.

Baruch Spinoza (1632 –1677) established that whether or not there is a god has important implications for what we know about the world, and about how we should live. He believed the greatest contentment we can experience in this life comes from our knowledge – which in turn comes from understanding God's attributes. The more we understand things this way, the less troubled we will be by strong emotions and the less we will fear death. In short he believed in a god, who was a positive contribution.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 –1716) Leibniz's proof of God can be summarized from his Théodicée in which he proposed the origin of the universe as a part of his argument for the existence of God:'It is known as the Leibniz Contingency Argument, or the Leibniz Cosmological Argument (a study of the origins of the cosmos, or universe). The logic of the argument, repeated on many occasions, is:

1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence.

2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.

3. The universe exists.