The great debate on rationalism versus Empiricism, whether to believe in a priori or a Posteriori knowledge has many of great arguments from both the rationalists and the empiricists. Are you just a, Tabula Rasa, blank slate or is all knowledge formed by Reason? As this debate grabs your mind and twists it to the reality it may already belong in. How can we know anything of itself, are our minds just wandering in an alternate reality? A quote by Albert Einstein “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” one of the most influential people discussing limitations on the rational mind.
This theory has confronted many physicists with decisions that challenge conventional wisdom and this “fork in the road” has the potential to radically change the modern day fundamental physics. Alan Guth, a cosmological pioneer, said, “The multiple-universe idea severely limits our hopes to understand the world from fundamental principles.” Lightman argues that we are living in a universe that is uncalculable, created by accident. Lightman argues this because of the principle of fine-tuning, miniscule changes account for the possibility of life. For example, out of all the possible amounts of dark matter, our universe contains the minute range which allows life. Due to this principle, Lightman views only to solutions as realistic explanations, intelligent design and the multiverse theory.
With that said it can be argued that this is not true because a large amount of people know that the soul is immaterial rather than a contingent object. Plato is a dualist like Descartes but focuses on the immorality of the soul therefore showing its existence. The first argument is the cyclical argument, which simply says that the soul must be immortal since the living come from the dead. The argument from recollection argues that it is possible to gain information out of a person who seems not to have any knowledge of a subject, a priori knowledge therefore suggesting that this
Those that would argue against Dawkins’ ideas may consider themselves dualists; the most famous dualist would be Plato. Following on from his Theory of the World of the Forms, he argued that the soul is, in fact, more important than the body. This is because the body is a part of the physical and empirical world, and will eventually decay; whereas the soul is a separate entity, and is eternal, immortal and unchanging – like those things which belong in the World of the Forms. Plato uses two arguments to suggest why the soul must exist outside of our bodies: firstly, the argument of knowledge: many mathematical problems are true in all circumstances, whether this is in the physical world or the World of the Forms. Therefore, learning is actually only remembering what the soul already knew from the World of the Forms.
This idea links to predestination in the fact that it believes everything in the universe- even human action- has a cause which precedes it. This is based upon science, as if it wasn’t case that one event or set of circumstances lead to another, scientific observations and conclusions drawn from that, then it would be both meaningless and pointless.
I am a theist- I wholly and completely accept that a diety exists: a force greater than myself, a being responsible for the creation of the cosmos, an entity satisfying the criteria of omnipotence, omnibenevolence, and omniscience. However, I strongly feel the famous historical arguments used to prove God's existence are all founded on shaky grounds, many have troublesome implications and they directly contradict the idea of "belief" and "faith"- something so destitute in the contemporary human condition. Pascal's wager forces the rational person to choose a belief in god over non-belief. This is because given the worst case scenario, a person is better believing in a diety that does not exist (neutral outcome) than not believing in a diety
Oddly enough, with this theory, it is prohibited to tell lies or commit suicide because that is morally wrong within itself and does not support the universal good of a rational decision, but if people acted in line with their duty to the universal law of their society, the results were of no consequence (Butts & Rich, 2008, Chapter 1). Kant stated that a person should act without emotion and with a complete sense of duty to serve the morally universal law of society and that the intention is of more importance than the result – consequences of the actions do not matter (Jasper, 1962). The theory of deontology follows this thought by setting demands that humans act at all times as though their actions would be universally accepted into an overall rule for society. He believed that duty and law are always one unit and cannot be separated and that with this duty to law, we shape our world. My criticism of this theory is that thought processes without emotions make our decisions too concrete.
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.
A person cannot do “whatever they like” because in many cases that would include things that are actually not beneficial to them. (Doing drugs might be an example. It might seem satisfactory at the moment, but ultimately, it damages their body.) A person must only do what seems to be in their best interest. Under moral egoism, no moral duty exists to anyone other than self.
At the same time, however, our personal set of opinions control how we see things around us. We are the ones that are given the choice of what is being seen and what is believed. Empiricism began with John Locke who attacked Cartesian idea that reason alone could provide us with knowledge. Locke came out with the term of “Tabula Rasa.” It means that the mind comes into life blank, or empty and is written on by experience. Later, Philosopher Hume came out with his version of the “tabula rasa” principle, the copy theory of ideas.