Philosophy
Stepping back for a thorough consideration.
Ever Overstated
Mankind has been contemplating its existence since its beginning. Some would say that through these timeless ponderings, much has been accomplished, and great insights have been revealed. Others would say that it has all been for nothing, a grand waste of time. But, as is explained herein, neither extreme properly represents the whole of philosophy. Some is correct, some is incorrect. Some is useful, some is not.
Below, several philosophical arguments and speculations dealing with the nature of our existence are expounded and examined. Each, either through affirmation or negation, exposes a small sliver of truth. Combined, these philosophical arguments consitute an invaluable piece of life's puzzle.
The Imagination Challenge
Imagination is often thought to be a faculty of the mind through which we can create anew. However, this may not be the case. After careful consideration, it seems that the only way a mind can form a "new" or "original" idea is to take a preexisting object, concept, or relationship, and apply it to another preexisting object, concept, or relationship. That is to say, our imagination can only operate on the experiences we have already had.
For example, consider the idea of a perfect circle from Plato's Argument from Beauty. We could not have conceived of a perfect circle without either experiencing it firsthand, or by extrapolating the previously experienced visually softening effect of adding sides to a regular polygon. Either case requires prior experience, and therefore the idea of a perfect circle cannot be generated from nothing.
Likewise, one could easily imagine a unicorn if they had seen a horse, a narwhal, and a stag; by applying the idea of a spiraling horn (an object observed in the narwhal), along with the idea of something growing out of a head (a concept, as observed in the case of the stag), to the idea of the body of the horse (another observed object), one could arrive at the idea of a unicorn. However, if you had never seen a horn, or a horse, or even things that resemble a horn or a horse, how could you conceive of a unicorn? How could you even conceive of a horn? So it seems that our imaginations are limited entirely to what we have already experienced. We can create new combinations of what we have already experienced, but we cannot imagine something utterly new. Essentially, we cannot know what we have not experienced, and we can only imagine things insofar as we can apply past experiences.
So, then, the challenge is this: Prove wrong the claim that imagination is experience-limited by finding an example of something imagined that is not the recombination of past experiences
OR
show how God could have been imagined by combining a human's experiences on Earth.
If this challenge cannot be debunked, we know that the idea of a God could not have been made up—in other words, we know that God exists.