This thread is meandering, pointless and ill defined.
Have a great weekend folks.
Perhaps a problem is with the word deduce. Can we deduce that God exists from some self-evident assumptions? What are those self-evident assumptions that we are using. One of the most famous is the Principle of Causality that everything has a cause, which applies supposedly to all material things and to all “contingent” beings. If everything has a cause, then to avoid an infinite regress, we come to the Uncaused Cause. Of course, now we are using a second assumption, that an infinite regress is not acceptable, which is self evident to some, but not to all.
Then there are the proofs by induction methods which go from our personal perceptions of consciousness to an awareness of something spiritual, non-material, but still some overwhelming power in the universe of which we are some tiny part. There are after death experiences which give a hint about what life would be after death.
In mathematics, once a theorem is given, based on the axioms, there is no doubt that it is true. Take for example, the proof in Euclidean geometry that the base angles of an isosceles triangle are equal. It is universally recognized to be true. I don’t see that type of universal recognition of deductive certainty with the proofs for the existence of God.
