If God breaks this, then he is not being omnibenevolent (all good), which is another of his attributes. However lust is far from morally right, so God cannot experience it. Leading on from that, since God is confined to being morally perfect, he has no choice whether he is or not, he can’t be omnipotent. Another aspect of this argument is can God fear? We are either scared of the unknown (e.g death) or something more powerful than ourselves (e.g lions).
If God is all knowing and all powerful and all good, therefore god would not want us to suffer and not put evil on earth. I believe that evil and suffering does exist because of the simple fact that we wouldn’t know the difference between good and bad, sad and happiness, love and hate. We wouldn’t know to appreciate god and everything he does for us. God being an all tri-omni god would not put anything on earth that he knew we couldn’t handle. There are two varieties of evil, moral and natural evil.
‘The universe needs no explanation.’ Discuss. (10 marks) Christian philosopher St Thomas Aquinas would have disagreed with this statement as he was the one that put the cosmological argument forward which questions the universe and how it came into existence. Aquinas would have maintained his view as he believes that everything that is in motion has been caused by something else and he believes that this something else is God. He also claims that God is the first cause as he is the one that caused the universe to come into existence and continues to keep it in motion. He would continue to disagree with this statement because he claimed that because everything in the universe is contingent, it must mean that the universe as a whole must have a cause behind it.
He is malevolent. Is God both able and willing? Then whence commeth the evil. If he is neither able nor willing then why call him god?” This is called the inconsistent triad; if God has all these Omni qualities then why does evil still remain on earth? Augustine’s soul deciding theodicy was the demonstration that God is not responsible for the existence of evil.
Eternal law cannot be understood, it is everlasting, and unchangeable. Thomas says the whole world is ordered by the providence of God not with chaos. Humans do not have it in themselves to sustain this law without it passing away. Everything comes into passing and is created by a God and has a purpose. Even though humans are not eternal, the forms of human beings are eternal in the mind of God.
Anselm (1033–1109) had opposed an Ontological Argument that one understands God as a being and cannot conceive anything greater because God cannot be understood not to exist. On the other hand, another philosopher named Gaunilo objected Anselm’s Ontological Argument by suggesting that the same style of argument can be used to prove the existence of other entities, such as the idea of a greatest possible island. Although this may be the case, Anselm never got the opportunity to plead his case against Gaunilo’s objection. However, there are numerous biblical evidence to help support Anselm’s argument. Anselm’s Ontological Argument states that one understands that God, as a being, cannot be conceived a greater.
If God did create the difference between right and wrong then that means that for God, initially, there wasn’t a difference between to two. With that being said, it follows that it is not possible to say whether God is good or not. This is due to the fact that if right and wrong were God’s creation, then prior to his conception of the two ideas, they did not exist or apply to him. The writer then determines that it is unreasonable to assume that God has any relation to the creation of right and wrong while also saying that God is good. If God is assumed to be good, then all of his actions are good, and this would include the creation of right and wrong.
So when we say ’God is good’, we need to know that we are using ’good’ in that sentence. In univocal terms this would be claiming that God is good in some way that humans are, Aquinas rejected this as he believed God to be perfect. Because of this, imperfect humans can’t be good in the same way that God is. In equivocal terms, this would mean that God is good in a totally different way to humans, Aquinas rejected that too. He argued that if people speak equivocally about God, then it cannot profess to know anything about him as it is saying that the language we use to describe humans or the experienced world around us, doesn’t apply to God.
But because it’s impossible to conceive a greater being that God he must exist in both reality and our minds. In Anselm’s view only a fool can therefore doubt the existence of God, because the ‘fool’ has the idea of God in their mind to doubt him,
The first way is based around Motion describing whatever that is in motion there must be something else behind it. Therefore it cannot be going back infinity there must be an unmoved action which started off without having cause and the only solution to the unmoved action is God. The second way is based on cause which is saying that nothing can cause its self it doesn’t exist without being caused. To find the right cause that started everything we cannot go infinity to find the main cause and if nothing can cause it’s self there must be an uncaused cause and the cause is God because God is the beginning and the end of everything. The third way is the contingency of the matter in the universe, explaining that there must be a being or something that brought everything into existence.