Some philosophers such as Aquinas believe that it is possible to talk meaningfully, truthfully and factually about God whereas others like Ayer believe this to be impossible. Philosophers have suggested that there are four ways that religious language might make truth claims about the reality of God and whether it can succeed in doing this – Via Negativa, Analogy, and Myth. The ‘via negativa’ or negative way is an attempt to prevent people from misrepresenting God. It claims that the only way we can talk about God is by saying what God is not. God is so beyond our ability to understand that the only way of seeing the reality of God is to continue saying what God is not, God is more than anything we can say of him.
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.
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.
Truth is an elusive concept, one which relies less on fact than it does on individual perception; as such, it is evident to see that scientific criticisms of religious creation theories are without substance. These theories were simply perceived by the world of science to be physically impossible to support their own beliefs, whereas religious criticisms of the Big Bang theory are based on proven fact, rather than interpretation. In addition to this scientific bias, the Big Bang Theory is greatly flawed in its inability to explain proven scientific ideas about our universe which contradict the theory in its entirety. Yet still, the most conclusive proof of the supremacy of the idea of God as the creator is the singularity in the Big Bang theory that cannot be proven: everything with a beginning in time must have a beginner, one not accounted for in this scientific theory. Information pertaining to the creation of the universe, or lack thereof, suggests that the idea of a Divine Creator, as opposed to the Big Bang Theory, is the most reasonable premise regarding how our universe came to exist.
These arguments never get to any particular God. They have all established that the existence can be described by itself; none of this even implies a deity, or a universal consciousness. When you start by rejecting the presumption of a God, all the arguments fall flat on their face. What these three arguments are, are thesis trying to defend the indefensible. Although, these three arguments all agree in the way that they use unfound assumptions to prove what has yet to be proven; they do disagree on the studies of how to prove what really is God.
“EXPLAIN WHAT IS MEANT BY ‘GOD IS DEAD’ AND ‘THERE IS NO GOD’” The statement “God is dead” and “There is no God” can be interpreted in many different ways. The term God is dead comes from the idea of a man called Freidrich Nietzche who put forward this, however the statement could also be interpreted from an atheist view that there is no God at all. These two statements differ in meaning as the term God is dead implies there is no need for God anymore and he is no longer, but this is suggesting that there once was a God which differs to the atheist based statement that there is no God completely. Freidrich Neitzche began from the assumption that there is no God, despite his religious background he brought about the theory “God is dead”. He believed that life is meaningless and that we have no souls, so we should therefore grasp everything that the world has to offer whilst we can as there is no chance of an afterlife in his perspective.
Responding to an Atheistic View A.W. Tozer once said, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us”. In the his article, On Being an Atheist, H.J. McCloskey leaves little doubt of what enters his mind when he thinks about God. He argues that there are no real reasons to believe in God and takes the approach of dissecting several arguments used by both sides of the spectrum.
Essay 1 Faith and Reason “Reason, aided by Christian faith, reveals truths about the universe and about humans that could never have been reached by reason alone. Conversely, Christian faith needs reason in order to communicate its beliefs clearly, to arrange those beliefs in a more systematic form, to guard it from straying into fanaticism or error, and to provide answers to reasonable objections to those beliefs”(1-2). Many argue that faith and reason are two very different things, when in all reality they both need each other and as Albl states they are actually “inseparable”. I am Catholic myself and I have always learned that authentic Christian faith does not limit human liberty and reason. Instead, faith supports reason and perfection; and reason, illuminated by faith, finds strength to raise itself to the knowledge of God.
Aquinas Five ways consisted of motion, causation of existence, contingent and necessary objects, the argument for degrees and perfection and the argument for intelligent design. Aquinas thought without this we could not assume God’s existence hence why he would have disagreed with proving God’s existence through definition alone. One of Aquinas’s points was that God’s existence cannot be regarded as ‘self-evident’, in other words you can’t simply say God is real you must back it up with evidence. Aquinas believed that although we have a understanding of what God is, God will always remain unknowable to the finite human mind. Kant argued that existence was not a ‘predicate’, in other words existence is not a characteristic or an attribute of something.
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.