If, for lack of better terminology, God were to “turn his head” all that is not being perceived would cease to exist. To support his claim of God as the divine constant perceiver, Berkeley must prove the existence of God and God’s constant perception of existence. Berkeley’s arguments one weakness and last step to being completely empirical is the removal of God as a divine perceiver. Perception presupposes two parts, a perceiver and the perceived; why not a singular entity; human. With the removal of God from his argument, Berkeley would take empiricism to its conclusion, and position self-perception as maintaining our existence.
McCloskey attempts to make an argument for the non-existence of God and to give reasons why atheism is more comforting than theism. This paper is a response to that article which will address certain ideas raised by Mr. McCloskey. This author is a theist and will present arguments to show the reasoning for the existence and necessity of God. To begin with, McCloskey suggests in his article that the theist’s arguments are “proofs” which do not provide definitive evidence for the existence of God, so therefore, they should be discarded. This is not a justified argument due to the fact that theists do not try to definitely prove the existence of God.
Inclination essentially relinquishes scholarly objectivity. McCloskey contended that the cosmological argument was an argument from the presence of the world, as people know it. He expressed that having faith in an uncaused first cause for the universe is an issue in light of the fact that nothing about our universe powers us to that conclusion. The reason impact defense comprehends a connection between things that are in existence and will come
Kant then argued that God’s existence in the ontological argument is based on a synthetic statements (‘God is that which than greater cannot be imagined’ and ‘existing is greater than not existing’) therefore more evidence and proof is required in addition to the ontological argument in order to verify the existence of God. The ontological argument also features the idea that God has necessary existence – because his definition is that he is perfect and existing is more perfect than not existing, God must have necessary existence. However Kant opposed this idea and said that if we reject the whole idea of God that his definition is no longer important and thus he
I disagree that Hume's arguments to causation are successful to a full extent due to the fact that Hume's challenges criticise causation from the point of view that empirical evidence is our only source of knowledge, suggesting we cannot know whether the effect due to cause can be discovered because "the effect is different from the cause, and so can never be discovered." Yet why should we apply the limitations of our ability to state that God does not exist? To further evaluate, Hume states we are bound by empirical data and so we will only be able to 'induce' that the regress of cause and effect exists and so this regress falls foul to Hume's Fork. The criticism of Hume's challenge is formulated in the sense that because philosophically and empirically "we will never know the true origins of the universe" it does not mean that "the universe is the "brute fact" as stated by B. Russell. A second challenge of Hume is that we are able to possibly imagine that something can cause itself into existence.
Rand says “Reality, the external world, exists independent of man’s consciousness, independent of any observer’s knowledge, beliefs, feelings, desires or fears…” (qtd. The Ayn Rand Institute 1). Consciousness, therefore, is to distinguish reality, not to fashion or form it around a personal belief. Consequently, Objectivists reject all forms of a supernatural or any beliefs unfounded in fact. In the quote below Rand explains why she rejects religion outright, and she believes man himself deserves the attention: Just as religion has preempted the field of ethics, turning morality against man, so it has usurped the highest moral concepts of our language, placing them outside this earth and beyond man’s reach.
From this Moore claimed that it is impossible to derive an ‘is from an ought’. This criticism became known as the naturalistic fallacy. In addition to this G.E Moore claimed that naturalism was not able to stand up to the open question argument. ethical naturalism claims to be based on moral facts, it would therefore seem logical that these facts should stand up to scrutiny. Yet, if we observe that pleasure is good, we should be able to ask is good pleasure.
Morality does not come directly from God. This is the idea behind the Autonomy thesis. This option says that an act is either immoral or moral based on things apart from the commands of God. Actions are right or wrong in and of themselves regardless of God’s commands. The issues with this option mainly deal with the definition of a theistic God.
Since we know evil and suffering is a necessary bi-product of human life, we must acknowledge that evil does exist. This proves problematic as it then brings into question the traditional theist’s view of God. However, no traditional theist would accept Hume’s conclusions because it denies God of His perfection. There are ways of sidestepping this issue such as, atheism, deism and polytheism, but none are accepted by traditional theists, and are therefore not a true solution to the problem. A theodicy is seen as a true solution as it defends God’s nature in the face of evil and suffering.
He therefore rejected an infinite universe because he did not believe that it was a satisfactory explanation for its existence. Copleston supported Aquinas’ rejection of infinite regress on the grounds that an infinite chain of contingent beings could only ever consist of contingent beings, which would never be able to bring itself into existence. However, Bertand Russell opposed that the cosmological argument was evidence for the existence of God, he rejected the idea of contingency also, and he argued that a ‘necessary being’ has no meaning. Kant examined the argument of the existence of a supreme being as a first cause of the universe. He argued that cause and effect can only be applied to the world.