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.
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.
However, in the case that he lacked omnibenevolence, evil would still cast a dark shadow in the world because perhaps God does not desire to relieve it. In actuality, God can be all three, and evil can and does exist. This is true because God is not responsible for the evil in the world. Evil blemishes the world wherever the world is lacking in goodness. If evil did not taint the world, the world would lack good and freewill, too.
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."
Simply put, the fine-tuning argument contends that the universe was designed to ultimately create human beings. Fine-tuning is an argument which is able to contest one of the atheist’s own theories to disprove God. This will be explained in more detail later in this paper. In response to this, McCloskey says the cosmological argument “does not entitle us to postulate an all-powerful, all-perfect, uncaused cause.” As mentioned before, the cosmological argument is but one part of a concurrence for the existence of God. It does not prove God’s existence; it argues that there must be a necessary being which created the universe.
In his essay, “Where I lived, and What I lived For”, Henry David Thoreau says, “Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundless truths, while reality is fabulous.” He talks about how much better life would be if people focused on reality rather than their dreams. In doing so, Thoreau appears to his audience using logic. He establishes himself as someone who has faced this type of situation before. People are caught up in ‘soundless truths’ which means that they are fooling themselves of the real truth. He says that people should not allow themselves to get their hopes up that something good is going to happen to them.
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.
Atheism is often mistaken for the lack of belief in God, yet this could encompass certain Humanists, Agnostics or even children that have not yet been faced with the idea of God. Atheism is a post enlightenment European movement that flourished with the cult of individualism of the new era. It has no sacred text, revelation or set belief system and so it is impossible to group Atheists into a unified group. The only shared factor between Atheists is the disbelief in a God. Being an Atheist will influence an individual’s aspirations and behaviour, and will do so independently from individual to individual, generally however, Atheism will influence similarly.
Free will means that God does not have any set destiny for us. If God were to create free agents that could only choose good, that would mean that God laid out a destiny of good for all agents. Even though God is omniscient, free will is still possible because while God may know the choices we are going to make, he is not the cause of them. Since God does not choose or cause our destiny, we still have free will. In response to the option in which God creates a world with free agents and no evil, a world with no evil would mean a world with no good, so it would be impossible for God to create a free agents that only choose good, since evil does not exist.
“Being an atheist means coming to grip with reality. A meaningless universe does not mean we live our lives without purpose. The pointlessness of life is not a thing to be overcome, it is to be celebrated.” This is the exact quote that I saw while scrolling through Instagram, from an atheist friend. “When you start to think in universal time spans, your perception of humanity must necessarily change. Differences of opinion seem pathetic.