Everything can be overridden by Love/Agape, it can be used as an excuse to justify any action. All ethics are judgments on behaviours, intentions and consequences. Situational ethics is about consequences, outcomes, however if love overrides all of the rules, then the only judgement that should be made is whether the outcome is one done with love. It is people who decide on the rules, making the moral judgement, deciding on what LOVE/AGAPE means in real situations. People who are trying to apply this broad, deep, Christian version of the word love/agape.
Omniscience refers to God’s unlimited knowledge which includes the knowledge of the past, present and future. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all believe claim that omniscience is a coherent concept, believing that God is omniscient alongside the belief that humans are morally responsible for some of their actions at the least. They believe that people have a free choice as to what they do when faced with a dilemma; that God does not force them into a certain decision but leaves humans to choose, which in turn leaves humans alone responsible for their actions. Thomas Aquinas suggested that the knowledge God possessed was not physical, he argued that humans gain knowledge through their bodies, such as taste, but this does not mean that knowledge itself is physical. We are able to know that the square root of 9 is 3, but a square root is not a physical thing, we cannot hold it, this however does not stop us from knowing what a square root is.
He is half correct in his statement as a theist does not believe in the proofs individually, but finds enough evidence in them to form the belief that God does exist; He is the creator of the universe, and He is morally perfect. McCloskey touches on faith in his article. It is defined by Tillich: as the state of being ultimately concerned as claiming truth for concern, and is involving commitment, courage, and the taking of risk. Theists have faith in God, and treat Him as the most important person in their lives. 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.
It is important to note that although all moral absolutists agree that there are fundamental ethical laws they disagree on the origin or authority of these laws. They may be religious or like Kantian ethics based on God and the existence of natural law. In general there tends to be a consensus that Absolutism comes in three distinct types. Platonic Idealism is the first significant example of absolutist theory. This theory is referred to as the theory of forms, the forms are eternal constants which give meaning to the world.
“Will to Power” is a section that is parallel to “Thoughts on Life” because is discusses an individuals will to become powerful and make a personal stand for themselves. In “On Interpretation” he shares his view that there is no fact in the world because everything is an interpretation. As you can see all of these sections have a possible relation to Christianity and their set of beliefs. A particular problem I notice with Nietzsche’s aphorisms is that it creates an image for the reader to portray a Christian to be a weak mined helpless being. He basically degrades the entire Bible by saying that there is no fact in the world and everything is an interpretation.
I choose whether to believe in God or not, based on evidence and experiences in my own life. Thus, it would seem quite obvious that we do indeed have freewill. But what if our actions are really all pre-determined, and we only have this illusion of freedom of choice. What if they are controlled by Distinct Causation, the idea that our behaviors are cause by things like genetics, upbringing, and other things over which we have no control (Sober 2002)? God is all powerful and all knowing.
In the philosophical view of determinism with respect to free will, it focuses more on the circumstances surrounding the agent instead of just the individual agent. A strength to determinism is that there is a cause for everything, therefore nothing is left to chance and that there is always a reason to be traced back to. On the other hand, the same theory states that agents are not responsible for their own actions because previous events dictated their behavior, and that is considered by many to be a weakness of determinism. Critics of determinism claim that having a universal view of determinism will lead to moral irresponsibility and moral decay (Nichols and Knobe 664). Compatibilism, also referred to as soft determinism, is “the view that all events, including human actions, are caused.
Freud explained that the mind was divided into three areas; the ‘ID’ where our base instincts are such as desire and appetite, the ‘Ego’ a part of our mind that is shaped by external influences and the ‘Superego’ a part of the ego that is shaped by the influences that have affected our development such as parents and teachers. He believed that our conscience was the result of our social conditioning or socialisation thus all moral values are subjective. However, the argument for God is also largely supported, although the argument does not suggest that there must be a God, but rather that God is needed for morality to achieve its end. Cardinal Newman agreed with Kant that the existence of
Every living thing on this earth must have a cause, God is said to be an uncaused cause (which means nothing caused God, but God caused everything), but many say that God is existing and if this is possibly valid he must have to exist. However, if he does have a cause he can’t be God. So in reality God cannot possibly exist, He may not attribute both divine and human like traits. Hume’s argument mentioned above, relates to his
Free will must account for our undeniable experience of freedom of choice. However, it does not necessarily need to conclude that our choices are free from antecedent factors - empirical evidence. It must also account for the flexible, conscious control that we experience in everyday life - the fact that we deliberately select goals, values, and optional plans of action (Voss 1997). In free will, there is something or someone who will choose and choice is an action, therefore there should be an “actor”, and this is “our mind” which is the totality of our mental processes. This aspect of our “mind” knows and aware of the self that recognizes the free will.