Yet if anything is made and there is no cause at all for it, is to say that something is affected when it is affected by nothing or at all affected. Anything that exists has a cause, a reason, a ground of its existence, a foundation on which its existence relies and an applicable rationale or reason why it does
I myself am an Atheist, and therefore in my opinion believe miracles are impossible as all miracles are by, definition impossible if they claim to be the action of a deity. There are four different definitions of miracles, A ‘radical change for the better’ in a person, an ordinary event which has Religious significance for the believer, A remarkable or unusual event which has been directly caused by God but does not go against or break the laws of nature and The ‘laws of nature’ are being broken by God, which is the definition David Hume (18th Century) uses. This more traditional understanding of a miracle is the understanding of classical Theism, namely that God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, and therefore he does intervene on occasion to perform miracles. As an atheist, David Hume refutes miracles, he does not believe that they can happen, although he has one of the most famous definitions of the traditional understanding of a miracle. Hume
William Paley’s argument William Paley’s design argument is the idea of purpose or chance. Paley argues for purpose. He believes that the order, beauty and complexity of this world could not be blind chance and therefore must have a purpose. Paley believes that for everything to work so intricately together there must be a divine intelligence ordering it; A creator. He believed this creator to be God.
The argument goes like this: 1. Assume God does not exist. 2. 'God' is defined as "that than which no greater can be conceived" 3. "That than which no greater can be conceived" must therefore not exist.
Teleological Even though there were five ways written to prove the existence of god, only three are key to the cosmological argument that was originally thought of by Aristotle who was an ancient Greek philosopher, to deal with the idea of flux (change). The first way that Aquinas suggests is that there is a god and this is because an object can only move when external force is applied, for example a person pushing a tin over, this tin will only move if someone applies force to it, and Aquinas believes that if you follow these forces back far enough you will reach a Prime mover, as he believed that the movements of change cannot go back to infinity so there must be a prime mover, and that prime mover must be god. The second way thought up by Aquinas is the concept of an unmoved causer. This unmoved causer is there to suggest that nothing in this world can cause itself and we were all caused by something and everything around us was caused by something. Whether that being our parents or people that make everyday objects that we see around us.
However, this would be absurd, seeing as that nothing greater than God can be conceived in anyway. So a being, which nothing greater can be conceived, God, does in fact exist. According to Joel Fienberg’s text, Reason and Responsibility, an Ontological argument is defined as “an argument for the existence of God stating that the very concept or definition of God automatically entails that God exists; because the special nature of the concept, there is no way that God could fail to exist” (pg. 722). This argument is formulated around the idea that God is a being, which no greater being can be conceived.
Although this possibility does not address the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” It supports certain finite causes. An infinite regress of causes for existence could have not started off from a first cause because the finite cause caused the first and a finite cause caused that find and so forth, meaning that the if you Consider C then you have to consider A because both possibilities acknowledge that there’s an infinite cause of existence. This possibility is implausible because it is already confirmed that the universe is finite and that a first finite cause caused the universe into being. This possibility infinitely fights off the problem of
Cosmological Argument The cosmological argument is a posteriori argument because it is a on what can be seen in the world and the universe * The argument is based on the belief that there is a first cause behind the existence of the universe. * The argument was first developed by Plato and Aristotle. * Thomas Aquinas has developed the most popular version of the cosmological argument. He developed his five ways to prove the existence of God in his book Summa Theologica. The first of the three ways form proof for the existence of God and are Change (or motion), Cause and Contingency.
If God does not exist, though, then something can be imagined that is greater that God, namely a God that does exist. “The hypothesis that God does not exist thus seems to give rise to a logical absurdity: that there both is and is not something that can be imagined that is greater than God. There is, because it’s possible to imagine a God that does exist. There isn’t, because it’s impossible to imagine something greater than the greatest thing imaginable.” Anselm’s second premise embarks on the fact that ‘that thing, like all things, exists in the mind or in the external world, or in both’. Just because something exists in the understanding does not mean that it also exists in reality.
1. St. Thomas Aquinas’ Cosmological Argument on Possibility and Necessity presents God as the absolutely necessary being that ultimately explains the existence of individual contingent beings. The universe is contingent, even if it arguably is without a cause. Because of its contingency, God is the ultimate reason for the existence of the universe. 2.