On one hand you have the philosophers who believe you can speak and write about God, because God is reality. On the other hand, are the Logical Positivists who claim that statements about God have no meaning because they don’t relate to anything that is real. There are a number of philosophers who claimed to have proven conclusively that religious language is meaningful, for example Aquinas’ theory of analogy. An analogy is an attempt to explain the meaning of something which is difficult to understand and forming relations through attributes or relations that are similar. Aquinas rejected univocal and equivocal language when talking about God.
According to him, there must be as much reality or perfection in the cause of anything as in the effect. Moreover, he believed that the notion of God represents something so ideal that he could not have been the cause of this idea. I believe that Descartes arguments are not really such convincing because of the following reasons which I would like to point out. We may all come to this point and consider that we all exist; however, it’s not completely true because Descartes had an idea of the perfect being in his mind, but I surely don't have such an idea. Now what am I to believe?
Christians could argue that they believe Jesus was still the Messiah and everything he stood for is what they believe in but maybe the authenticity of miracles today can be questioned as there is no Jesus around to prove them being performed by a Deity just as the definition says there should be. So believing in miracles would be hard to do because there is no proof because Christians just have to believe what the Bible says and can not question it even though there is no proof of miracles other than what the Bible says. It would be hard for Christians to believe in miracles because there is no evidence that supports them… (The Bible can’t be classed as evidence because it has no proof it’s real and could be a fictional book) But Christians would have to believe in them because if they disagree that would be sort of going against the belief of Jesus. I think Christians don’t have a choice and have to believe in miracles otherwise they’re going
All human beings seek to be rational in what they do. Yes, science does provide a method of justifying rationality but God is the other part of the spectrum that science cannot explain. God is also another figure that provides rationality to someone who does not understand science the only path to salvation and to rationality is through religion. If this form of God takes 1000 different shapes across many religions, it does not make God untrue, it is just a manifestation. The biggest contradictory idea against the motion would be that of whether God can be proven empirically.
They treated claims made about God as cognitive, meaning that the assertions made are meant to be taken as facts or universal truth claims rather than non-cognitive meaning on a personal level for believers. They believed that language was only meaningful if it was analytically or synthetically verified. Analytic statements are a priori (based on logic) and synthetic statements are a posteriori (based on empirical evidence). They created a test called verification principle to see if religious language was meaningful; Statements can only be meaningful if it can be demonstrated. One could argue that the logical positivists were unsuccessful in arguing that religious language is meaningless because the verification principle has many weaknesses.
The heart of Leibniz’s argument was that there must be a cause for the whole which explains the whole. Frederick Copleston would have disagreed with this statement because he believed that there has to be a necessary being which explains the contingent beings and this necessary being should contain within itself the reason for its own existence. Copleston would go on to say that this necessary being is God and God is therefore the explanation of the universe and how it came into existence. Hume would have agreed with this statement because he questioned the idea that everything has a cause. He claimed that
Since the beginning of time, the idea of a God or a supreme being existing has been debated and argued. One argument that supports the existence of God is the Ontological Argument. An Ontological Argument is an argument for God’s existence that begins with the idea of supreme perfection or unsurpassable greatness. The Ontological Argument can also be seen as the idea that God has placed within us a knowledge that God exists and cares for us. 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.
To have faith in someone on past knowledge, according to McCloskey, is reasonable however; it is unreasonable to have faith in God as we have no past knowledge of God. Theists base their knowledge of God on the revelations that He has given us, the Bible, and the
PHL 11 | The Five Ways | How does Thomas Aquinas 'prove' the existence of God? | | Rebeca Martinez 5/6/2013 | | Can we know anything about God? Of course, through the gift of faith we know that God exists. But is that merely a blind faith unsupported by reason? Obviously, our reason cannot of itself provide us with complete knowledge of God, if it could we would ourselves would be God.
The Ontological Argument for the Existence of God [Your Name] [Course] [Instructor] August 1, 2011 The Ontological Argument for the Existence of God The ontological argument is based on logic and reason and not observance of the physical world. “Deductive arguments or ‘ontological proofs’ offered for or against the existence of God claim that belief in God is either necessary or absurd from the very nature of things. If one starts with the right premises and definitions, one is led by the inexorable processes of logic toward a necessary conclusion. The problem, of course, is that the premises and definitions that theists and non-theists want to use are rarely indubitable, and like the contexts required for interpreting inductive evidence, these premises and definitions inevitably involve assumptions about God or the world which are already in line with the conclusion one wishes to draw.” (Crutcher, 2010). Onotological Argument for the Existence of God Fails St. Anselm was the first to present an ontological proof of the existence of God.