So there must exist what it takes for the universe to exist. Why should there be If an immaterial soul exists, then God must exist (from Premise 12 in The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness, #12, above). But we have found a compelling, and admirably succinct version (written almost twenty years before Miracles) in H. W. B. Joseph's Some Problems in Ethics (Oxford University Press, 1931). A miracle is an event whose only adequate explanation is the extraordinary and direct intervention of God. We have done our best to simplify it. Only something itself infinite could have implanted knowledge of the infinite in us ( from 2 and 3). does not seem elusive or farfetched. 35. The fact that Blaise Pascal stated his wager as two stark choices, putting the outcomes in blatantly Christian terms eternal salvation and eternal damnation reveals more about his own upbringing than they do about the logic of belief. These organs must have a designer who designed them with their function in mind: just as a watch implies a watchmaker, an eye implies an eyemaker (from 1 & 2). Cass had started out with all the standard arguments for God's existence, the ones discussed in philosophy classes and textbooks: The Cosmological Argument (#1), The Ontological Argument (#2), The Classical Argument from Design (#3A), the arguments from Miracles, Morality, and Mysticism (#'s 11, 16, and 22, respectively), Pascal's Wager (#31) , and William James's Argument from Pragmatism (#32). Question 1: Hasn't the Darwinian theory of evolution shown us how it is possible for all the order in the universe to have arisen by chance? The argument is not a proof, but a very powerful clue or sign. That can only happen, of course, given the existence of some supernatural being. And it may be said of any ground on which we may attempt to stand as true, Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum ["It flows and will flow swirling on forever" (Horace, Epistles, I, 2, 43)]. Our job is to give a defense of the faith in a way that is faithful to the But atheists have never done so. 5. can account for laws of logic; they are the correct standard for reasoning because Thus the analogy (X is to great beauty as great beauty is to small beauty) is not proportionate. And we know the COMMENT:The Argument from the Abundance of Arguments may be the most psychologically important of the thirty-six. This is the classic ontological, or a priori, argument.It was first articulated in 1070 by St. Anselm, who argued that because we . Call it the world. But caused by what? Sometimes people who are lost in life find their way. It would be impossible for us to reproduce the whole context Descartes gives for this proof (see his third Meditation), and fruitless to follow his scholastic vocabulary. We mention it here and adapt it for our purposes, not because it is a proof for the existence of God, but because it can help us in our search for God in the absence of such proof. 3. Frankly, that is incredible. The question is: why did God choose the moral rules he did? The sense in which I can't conceive of my own annihilation is like the sense in which I can't conceive of those whom I love may betray mea failure of the imagination, not an impossible state of affairs. This argument presents Spinoza's God. One ought to make 'the leap of faith' (the term is James's) and believe in God, and onlythenevaluate the evidence (from 1 and 4). It is not an argument which moves from your own personal experience to your own affirmation that God exists. He feels like he's wearing somebody else's coat, grabbed in a hurry from the bed in the spare bedroom after a boozy party. Cass had had the lower bunk bed. But we never ask, "Why do you think black dogs aren't out to kill you? This can give rise to selection for true, committed, altruism, not just the tit-for-tat exchange of favors. The laws of nature are intrinsically and objectively beautiful (from 1 & 2). Therefore the "religious" view of reality is correct. The whole vista is deserted beyond vacancy, deserted in the way of being inhospitable to human life. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's Edge Bio page, Chapter I: The Argument from the Improbable Self. only strong probability, not demonstrative certainty. 2. The consequences for the believer's life of believing should be considered as part of the evidence for the truth of the belief (just as the effectiveness of a scientific theory in its practical applications is considered evidence for the truth of the theory). 6. Privacy Policy and nothing besides that universe of changing, dependent things, then the universe -- and A posteriori arguments for God's existence (arguments from experience) A. Cosmological arguments: Beginning/Beginnner; Contingency/necessity 1. Yes, God is the first cause, the designer of life, What becomes of the argument then? An effective rational argument for God's existence can be an important first step in opening the mind to the possibility of faith -- in clearing some of the roadblocks and rubble that prevent people from taking the idea of divine revelation seriously. Rather it seeks to show that only God himself could have caused this idea to arise in our minds. The cause of genius must both lie outside of natural psychological processes and be such as to care about the progress of humankind (from 3 and 4). By the time you ask this question, you already are existing in a world in which you were born. Intelligence is part of what we find in the world. Technically, Lucinda's a psychologist, like Cass, only not like Cass at all. The God of the Old Testament commanded people to keep slaves, slay their enemies, execute blasphemers and homosexuals, and commit many other heinous acts. 7. "Natural theology is the idea of knowledge concerning God's existence and nature that we arrive at simply by applying our natural powers of reasonCrucially, the claims that are made are all based on philosophical argumentation rather than any appeal to divine revelation." Aquinas is a Christian theologian as well as a philosopher. Thus Aquinas' five ways defined God as the Unmoved Mover, the First Cause, the Necessary Being, the Absolute Being and the Grand Designer.It should be noted that Aquinas' arguments are based on some aspects of the sensible world. The argument has only one substantive premise, its first one, which, though unproved, is not unreasonable; it is, in fact, the claim that the universe itself is thoroughly reasonable. more and more of them -- even an infinite number, if that were possible -- we are And this "unknown" is God. respect and worthy of love. Certain beliefs effect a change for the better in the believer's life the necessary condition being that they are believed. FLAW 3:In some versions of the Argument from Altruism, God succeeds in getting people to act altruistically because he promises them a divine reward and threatens them with divine retribution. That can never If he did, thenhisreasons, whatever they are, can provide the grounding for moral truths forus, and God himself is redundant. does not exist. The unique role that Judaism played in disseminating monotheism, mostly through the organs of its two far more popular monotheistic offshoots, Christianity and Islam, has bequeathed to its adherents an unusual amount of attention, mostly negative, from adherents of those other monotheistic religions. laws possible. There are holy books that reveal the word of God. Why is it that you can tell a lot about a philosopher's metaphysics by knowing whether or not he or she accepts the ontological argument? end result of a long and purposeless chain of biological evolution. Now if the universe never began, then it always was. Thus, the argument is based on observed facts in nature, Genius does not happen by way of natural psychological processes (from 1). The more arguments there are for a proposition, the more confidence we should have in it, even if every argument is imperfect. If it really is a random event when I give the infirm man my seat in the subway, then in what sense is itmeto whom this good deed should be attributed? If so, all of them stand in need right now of being acted on by other things, or else they cannot change. But perhaps the hardness of the hard problem says more about what we find hard the limitations of the brains of Homo sapiens when it tries to think scientifically than about the hardness of the problem itself. But laws of logic are not material! We notice around us things that vary in certain ways. Not that we would have to believe in God after witnessing this event. The Argument from the Consensus of Mystics. Reply: Remember that we are seeking for a cause of spatio-temporal being. taken individually and separately, demonstrate the existence of a being that has some of It's a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it's happened on your watch. ), When there is no real connection between the nature of a proposition's subject and the nature of the predicate, the only way we can know the truth of that proposition is by sense experience and induction. This is one of the things meant by "God.". No one has even tried to explain the difference between good and evil in terms, for example, of the difference between heavy and light atoms. Free shipping for many products! But it was the character and teaching of Christ that led him to accept the things recounted there as genuine acts of God. He's thinking zealots proliferate and Seltzer prospers. Reply: If people were wrong about the theory of heliocentrism, they still experienced the sun and earth and motion. So it is with the proofs. Moreover, most of the atheists explanations are actually pretty reasonable, But we can only appeal, we cannot compel. Time Magazine, in a cover story on the so-called new atheists, had ended by dubbing him "the atheist with a soul." It is inconceivable that God not exist (from 4). He said: "I picked up the New Testament with a view to judging it, to weighing its pros and cons. FLAW:Evolution does not require infinitesimally improbable mutations, such as a fully formed eye appearing out of the blue in a single generation, because (a) mutations can have small effects (tissue that is slightly more transparent, or cells that are slightly more sensitive to light), and mutations contributing to these effects can accumulate over time; (b) for any sexually reproducing organism, the necessary mutations do not have to have occurred one after the other in a single line of descendants, but could have appeared independently in thousands of separate organisms, each mutating at random, and the necessary combinations could come together as the organisms mate and exchange genes; (c) life on earth has had a vast amount of time to accumulate the necessary mutations (almost four billion years). Pascal says that there are three kinds of people: those who have sought God and found him, those who are seeking and have not yet found, and those who neither seek nor find. 6. 4. Question 1: Christians believe they are going to live forever with God. . But it can be reformulated to appeal to a higher moral motive: If there is a God of infinite goodness, and he justly deserves my allegiance and faith, I risk doing the greatest injustice by not acknowledging him. It is hard to understand how such a being could "cease" to be. The Argument from the Intolerability of Insignificance. 2. Not from your experience of yourself or of the world that exists outside you. Remove them completely from their context, from the teaching and character of Christ. Few people rest their belief in God on a single, decisive logical argument. How could the primordial slime pools gurgle up the Sermon on the Mount? A cosmological argument seeks to explain the origin of a perfect Being (God) using the universal causation. We may call this view, with deliberate generality, "the religious view." The infinite transcendent cause of these things cannot be less than they are, For example, every hydrogen atom in our universe is ordered to combine with every oxygen atom in the proportion of 2:1 (which implies that every oxygen atom is reciprocally ordered to combine with every hydrogen atom in the proportion of 1:2). Laws of logic prescribe the correct chain I have taught a lesson on the existence of God a few times. It cannot have been uncaused, though, for the idea of an uncaused event is absurd; nothing comes from nothing. People behave altruistically to gain a reward or avoid a punishment in the life to come. Recent decades have seen a rise in interest in natural theology and the philosophy of religion. Therewas Jesse, andherewas Cass. The answer may be found in Romans 1:18. 2. A merciful God would surely have some understanding of why a person may not believe in him (if the evidence for God were obvious, the fancy reasoning of Pascal's wager would not be necessary), and so would extend compassion to a nonbeliever. what? One of the ideas we have is the idea of God -- an infinite, all-perfect being. For if atheists are right, then no objective moral values can exist. The undergraduates crowded his courses, but that counted, if anything, as a strike against him in his department. The claim of the Ontological Argument is that the concept of God is the one exception to this rule. FLAW 1:What exactly does effecting "a change for the better on the believer's life" mean? If the Bible is to be believed, then Jesus ministry was accompanied by frequent miraculous signs that his claims and his teachings were endorsed by God the Father. Question 3: But is real being just another "thought" or "concept"? If the probability of God's existence (ascertained by other means) is infinitesimal, then even if the cost of not believing in him is high, the overall expectation may not make it worthwhile to choose the "believe" row (after all, we take many other risks in life with severe possible costs but low probabilities, such as boarding an airplane). If I find in myself a desire which no experience In his survey of arguments for God's existence, Dawkins does touch on a sort of moral argument that he calls the Argument from Degree. Why might someone think that the whole question of this chapter, whether God's existence can be proved, is trivial, unimportant, distracting or wrongheaded? in collaboration with the others. For that matter, why not Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy? 4. There must be a transcendent realm in which perfect justice prevails (from 1 and 2). Proof is objective, but We might imagine a disobedient child who is about to be punished by his father. wants to swim; well, there is such a thing as water. Whereever there are two possibilities, it suggests, something must determine which of those possibilities is realised. For the idea of infinite perfection is already presupposed in our thinking about all these things and judging them imperfect. Terms of Service apply. material. If everyone has to borrow a certain book, but no one actually has it, then no one will ever get it. Though this first premise can't be proved, it is the guiding faith of many physicists (including Einstein). The explanation for consciousness must lie beyond physical laws (from 6). expose such inconsistency. We should take them at their word and ask: Given this picture, in what exactly is the moral good rooted? each have the right to create our own moral code. It didn't improve Galileo's life to believe that the earth moved around the sun rather than that the sun and the heavens revolve around the earth. You cannot say ahead of time how it will affect you. If it is infinitely old, then an infinite amount of time would have to have elapsed before (say) today. Plausible, however it can go back further. kalam argument has shown that the universe cannot be infinitely old. (2) Not everything can depend on another for its existence. Thus there seems to be no need for an actually existing God to account for the existence of the idea. But that is just the problem. The argument from contingency is usually viewed as the strongest argument for the existence of God. It is this which is either designed or not. If it does, then we can be confident that God exists. The Bible teaches that atheists are not really atheists. 1. For an antebellum Southerner, there was more to be gained in believing that slavery is morally permissible than in believing it heinous. FLAW 1:Theories of the evolution of altruism by natural selection have been around for decades and are now widely supported by many kinds of evidence. He's so far away that he is knee-deep in the swampy humanities. Were you frightened by one when you were small?" All three versions argue that any explanation of the universe must account for the fact that we humans ( or any complex organism that could observe its condition) exist in it. Does everyone have the desire mentioned in premise 2 of argument 16? If he tried long enough to grasp it, then he could get the fact of being Casshereto blank out of existence and then come dribbling weakly back in, like a fluorescent fixture flickering on and off toward death. Can we imagine less order? . 6. You might think back over that enormous documentation of accounts and ask yourself if that can be right. But then Goda God who is rightly angry at them for their treason against Him. It is illogical to suggest that something had no cause. You cannot pull a law of logic out of the But they are mutually incompatible. FLAW 2:We have evolved higer mental faculties, such as self-reflection and logic, that allow us to reason about the world, to persuade other people to form alliances with us, to learn from our mistakes, and to achieve other feats of reason. Existence is like a gift given from cause to effect. Only a being who understood the overall purpose of existence could create each person according to the purpose that person is meant to fulfill. The group of cosmological Numbers are mysterious to us because they are not material objects like rocks and tables, but at the same time they seem to be real entities, ones that we can't conjure up with any properties we fancy but that have their own necessary properties and relations, and hence must somehow exist outside us (see The Argument from Our Knowledge of The Infinite, #29, and The Argument from Mathematical Reality, #30 below). Second, the material universe (the cosmos) came into existence sometime in the past. You can't expect politicians to come up with a vision, they don't have it in them. The universe displays a staggering amount of intelligibility, both within the things we observe and in the way these things relate to others outside themselves.
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