Free will means that God does not have any set destiny for us. If God were to create free agents that could only choose good, that would mean that God laid out a destiny of good for all agents. Even though God is omniscient, free will is still possible because while God may know the choices we are going to make, he is not the cause of them. Since God does not choose or cause our destiny, we still have free will. In response to the option in which God creates a world with free agents and no evil, a world with no evil would mean a world with no good, so it would be impossible for God to create a free agents that only choose good, since evil does not exist.
Descartes declares he has to determine if there is a God and if he does exist, whether he can be a deceiver. The reason he has to determine the existence of God and what he is, rests in his theories of ideas. This is because we do not know if there is an outside world and we can almost imagine everything, so all depends on God’s existence and if he is a deceiver. “To prove that this non-deceiving God exists, Descartes finds in his mind a few principles he regards as necessary truths which are evident by the “natural light” which is the power or cognitive faculty for clear and distinct perception.” If arguments is presented in logical trains of thought, people could not help but to be swayed and to understand those arguments. Natural light
When Biblical scholars debate this they lose the true meaning of the text. They become more focused on proving it to be factual rather than looking at the scripture for what it is. The scientific theory is backed by better evidence and is more likely to be true, there is too much evidence to ignore it, and therefore it should be accepted for the most part. Then Genesis can be used as a metaphorical story that allows us to understand more fully who God really is. Genesis 1-2 can show us that God is all-powerful and all-loving.
It also puts limits on God’s power. According to the definition of a theistic God, God is omnipotent. If God is all powerful then he should be able to command whatever he wants but by saying that morality is independent of God would mean that God is subject to the rules of morality (Fisher, 359). All in all the main issues with the Autonomy Thesis are that it would only be reasonable if one was not considering the existence of a theistic
The two definitions of omniscient each raise different problems, the former raises questions about God’s omnipotence, as one needs to assess if the laws of nature can limit an omnipotent God. The latter raises problems as, if He exists outside of time as an eternal creator and knows the past, present and future simultaneously, do we still have free will? Problems to God’s omniscience highlighted in Book 5 is Molina who states that God does not interfere with humans choices or decisions, but merely observes all possible outcomes and thus sees the past, present and future simultaneously, fitting with an eternal God. Aquinas gives the image of a man standing on a mountain and witnessing the whole road and everything that happens on it and the various paths we may take. However, it is important to note how the man on the mountain does not influence any choices and so just because one sees what is happening, this does not mean that it in any way influences the decisions made.
This further reinforces that we have no choice or influence on our lives and the events that happen, so therefore God will know the ethical decisions we will make as he has already predestined them in our lives. Hard determinism is the teaching that denies humanity has free will and believes that all actions have a prior cause. It removes moral responsibility for our actions. Hard determinists would therefore agree with the statement above, and will believe that God does infact know what ethical decisions we will make as he has already perceived it. This idea links to predestination in the fact that it believes everything in the universe- even human action- has a cause which precedes it.
Descartes' argument in the Meditations is circular. Discuss. In trying to prove the existence of God, Descartes will, of course, have to rely on what he can clearly and distinctly perceive, because this is the only way he can know anything. However, Descartes also needs to prove that God exists for us to know what we clearly and distinctly perceive. This leads to the famous objection that he uses the existence of God to establish his doctrine of clear and distinct ideas, and that he uses his doctrine of clear and distinct ideas to establish the existence of God: his argument is circular.
Boethius was successful in his argument that God rewards and punishes justly.’ Discuss. (35) In this essay I am going to be examining Boethius and his theory of divine foreknowledge and attempting to come to a conclusion on whether or not his theory is successful in arguing that God rewards and punishes justly. Boethius’ argument is a very interesting theory that attempts to overcome the idea that God is partly responsible for human evil, if he knows in advance what we are going to do. It does so by arguing that God does in actual fact not know human actions in advance of us doing them and therefore cannot do anything about them. In this, Boethius’ ensures that God can be both omniscient and omnibenevolent.
When we say that a thing exists, we mean nothing more than that such a thing is perceived by us. “From all which I conclude , there is a mind that effects me every moment with all the sensible impressions I perceive. And from the variety, order, and manner of these, I conclude the author of them to be wise, powerful, and good, beyond comprehension.” (p. 50) This is the role that Berkeley says God plays in the world and in our minds. The objects we see around us are only cognitive fragments put into our head by an eternal mind. I do not completely agree with this because for God to have control of what ever mind perceives, he would have to be the creator of these minds.
The existence of God, in most human lives, serves as a path or map guiding us toward moral perfection, a way of living, thinking or striving in order to earn wonderful gifts. The gifts that have been set aside for us if we reach or surpass predefined goals that have been set for lives. However, do we in fact have a moral set of directions for us to follow? Who developed these rules and are we able to change them? According to St. Anselm in his ontological argument, he describes God as an idea or concept of which nothing greater can be conceived (Living Issues in Philosophy, page 388).