Pascal pointed out that Aquinas’ made the assumption that the uncaused cause, which is necessary for the Cosmological Argument, was the Christian God. As there is no empirical or scientific evidence for this to be the case then his argument does have little value for religious faith. For this reason, I agree with this claim. Karen Armstrong also criticises the Cosmological Argument as she says that Christians do not need to find reason, as Aquinas is trying to do, in order to debate with science. In her book “The Case for God” she writes that religion requires leaps of faith and should accept that there is no scientific proof for the existence of God.
Examine the strengths and weakness of the argument for the existence of God based on Religious Experience (18) Religious experience presents an argument for the existence of God far different from more traditional teleological or cosmological arguments; its defining feature being an inductive argument with a posteriori factors of experience. A religious experience means there has been an encounter with the divine, making it backed among religious believers as convincing evidence of God. Religious experiences occur in an extraordinary way that does not apply to straight forward empiricism, but rather happen in a spiritual, mystical or religious condition. This often makes them somewhat unfathomable, as they are so outside the normal ‘I-It’ experiences. These experiences would be referred to as ‘I-Thou’ by Buber.
'Boethius was successful in his argument that God rewards and punishes justly' Many philosophers have debated as to the meaning of an eternal God and as to whether this God is fair. Boethius believed that when we say that God is eternal, we mean that God is timeless. However, others reject this concept claiming that God being eternal means that god has no beginning and no end; he has always existed and always will. Boethius taught that God exists outside of time which means he cannot bear any mortal interactions to things which exist within time. Boethius used this theory to illustrate how God is not able to relate to humans as he is not in time with them, nor one of them.
He states that if one does not believe in a religion then one can gain nothing from religious debates. This seems like a fallacy of division. It is not black and white. Someone might be ill-informed or not knowledgeable enough about the belief of a religion. One could be searching for answers and find them from information used in a
Graffin claims that he is not a fundamentalist. He even goes as far to accuse some of his fellow atheists of having a fundamentalist view towards their disbelief- the same view that they disapprove of in religions. Graffin claims that faith is not restricted to religion. Graffin’s naturalist worldview stresses his faith in creativity, individualism, and interpersonal relationships. He asserts that no one worldview contains all of the answers to life- not his naturalist view or natural selection’s Darwinism.
With the removal of God from his argument, Berkeley would take empiricism to its conclusion, and position self-perception as maintaining our existence. I feel as though in his argumentation God is unnecessary and a human awareness of ourselves would be more tenable as an empirical
Summary Permission to Believe by Lawrence Kelleman is intended to provide a few rational approaches to God’s existence. The author begins the book by saying that people cannot believe in God because their “intellects dont allow them to”. He then goes on to say that others believe in God for “irrational reasons ”and only believe because it is Thier faith. Chapter one discusses atheism and agnosticism, both of which do not believe in an Almighty. Chapter two begins with the moral approach to God’s existence.
This is probably why Christopher thinks the way he does because you can not really see god, and probably doesn’t see the logic in religion either. It’s ones faith that drives someone to believe in him, while Christopher would not be able to have faith and believe because there would be no solid evidence that God exists and he mostly only believes in what he sees, something that is concrete. To Christopher God might be just another fairytale. “People believe in God because the world is very complicated and they think it is very unlikely that anything as complicated as a flying squirrel or the human eye or a brain could happen by chance. But they should think logically and if they thought logically they would see that they can only ask this question because it had already happened and they exist.
One of Aquinas’ ways of proving God’s existence; ‘the uncaused causer’, states that every cause in the universe has an effect, the chain of cause and effect must have a terminus to avoid infinite regress. Aquinas rejects infinite regress because it denotes that there cannot be an answer to the question “what is the explanation?” Therefore there must be a necessary being that started the chain, this for Aquinas is God but this is not a satisfactory answer for everyone. Bertrand Russell, somewhat like Aristotle, states that the universe is a “brute fact”, although unlike Aristotle did not see that there needed to be a Prime Mover or Uncaused Cause. Russell made another criticism when he suggested that one cannot go from saying that every event has a cause thus the whole universe has a cause, it is like moving from saying that every human being has a mother to the claim that the human race as a whole has a mother. One cannot move from individual causes to the totality (whole, everything) has a cause.
Rene Descartes’ existence of god The times in which we live in today make it almost impossible to prove God’s existence, and have many skeptics, scientists, and atheists’ trying to prove otherwise. One can even argue that if God’s existence was possible to prove then one would have no need for faith. Rene Descartes had faith and put forth several arguments to try and prove the existence of God in his Meditations, particularly his Third Meditation: of God, that he exists. To begin, Descartes tries to prove God’s existence with “causal arguments.” He claims that there must be at least as much reality in the cause as there is in the effect, the effect being himself, humans, earth, etc…;