PART A: Explain Mill’s challenge to the teleological argument. (25marks) The teleological argument claims that God designed the world with a purpose. God is often described to be omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent. Mill criticises the idea of the teleological argument, he doesn’t believe that the world is designed by a God because within nature there are cruelty and crimes that are unpunished. Mill argues that if God designed the universe he wouldn’t have created something containing any evil at all it wouldn’t fit in with his description.
McCloskey contended against the three mystical verifications, which are the cosmological argument, the argument from design and the teleological argument. He called attention to the presence of evil on the planet that God made. He likewise called attention to that it is irrational to live by trust or faith. As indicated by McCloskey, confirmations do not essentially assume a fundamental part in the conviction of God. Page 62 of the article expresses that "most theists do not come to have faith in God as a premise for religious conviction, however come to religion as a consequence of different reasons and variables."
He solved this problem by saying that god is responsible for the evil in the world by defining evil as “privation”. By this he means when we use worlds like “evil” and “bad” we are saying that something does not meet our expectations of what it should be like ( by nature). Augustine wrote that evil is not a substance but is in fact an absence of kind feelings. Augustine also said that god can’t be blamed for creating evil himself that occurs in the world. As he said that in fact evil comes from angels and human beings who chose deliberately to deny and disobey what God had taught them, by turning away from him and what he had wished for mankind.
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. “Exaltation” is usually taken to mean an emotional state evoked by contemplating the supernatural. “Worship” means the emotional experience of loyalty and dedication to something higher than man… But such concepts do name actual emotions, even though no supernatural dimension exists; and these emotions are experienced as uplifting or ennobling, without the self-abasement required by religious definitions.
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.
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.
“God is the means by which man receives moral knowledge, but that knowledge has not come directly from God’s morally good nature.” This quote means that God is not wholly good, he only receives the goodness, and just passes it onto man. This therefore supports the idea that morality isn’t dependant on religion because if God was Omniscient then he would already know what is good. Therefore God can’t be the main form of moral goodness as he himself isn’t good, he’s just the passenger, and just conforms the goodness. Meaning morality is dependent on religion. The second horn to the Euthyphro dilemma is; “Is X good because God commands it?” This part of the question suggests that there is no doubt that God is the direct source of any moral knowledge, and that morality doesn’t come directly from
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.
If evil did not taint the world, the world would lack good and freewill, too. God chose freewill for his people rather than a deficit of evil. To have the freedom to do anything outweighs the sum of the evil in the world. Evil can also be viewed as an alternative to a lack of goodness in the world. Without evil to counter good, good would not
“Evolution”. There is a mistaken belief that atheists are shut off from any experience of mystery in the world, and that this too makes them flat and cold. But atheists don’t give adoration for life with their belief in God, nor do they cease to feel animated by power and beauty of creation, because they stand in doubt of its purported creator. To be fair, the atheists have their own issue to confront. They are not the devils of the religious landscape just because they have no belief in a God yet neither are they its angels Here we look at Rebecca Elson’s poem “Evolution”.