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.
“For whoever killed Laius might decide to raise his hand against me. So, acting on behalf of Laius, I benefit myself, too”(Sophocles 10). The intended meaning is that Oedipus wants to find the murderer of Laius not only to save Thebes, but incase the murderer decides to kill Oedipus since he is king as he did Laius when he was king. The unintended meaning is that Oedipus himself is the murderer so he is trying to protect himself from himself, which ultimately fails because he pierces his own eyes. “I shall make a proclamation, speaking as one who has no connection with this affair, nor with the murderer”(Sophocles 14).
Augustine defends the god of theism by rejecting the existence of evil as a force or power opposed to god as it would reject the premise that god is omnipotent. Below are the ways in which he justifies moral and natural evil, which respectively mean evil caused by human acts, and evil events caused by the processes of nature. To justify evil, he solves the problem by defining evil as a ‘privation’ – which means when something is ‘evil’, it is not defined to contain bad qualities but is seen to be falling short of perfection, or what it is expected to be. Take a rapist as an example. Adopting Augustine’s idea of ‘evil’, we are to say that he is not living up to standards expected of human beings.
Therefore, Wiles comes to the conclusion that God's goodness and the concept of miracles are two incompatible ideas. When discussing God's omnibenevolemce, Wiles introduces the nature of God and its impact on miracles. However, this also anthropomorphises him. As humans, with a limited knowledge of what the word 'good' means, Maimonedes states that it would be disrespectful to attribute this equivocal concept to an unlimited God. We cannot judge God, nor his actions because he is a non cognitive being.
Surely and all loving (omnibenevolent) God wouldn’t allow this. Human Evil is where people cause harm to others and create chaos. Why would God create a world that consists of evil and cruelty? therefore Mill questions the idea of an omnibenevolent God, however if it is disagreed that God isn’t all loving then it could suggest that God doesn’t know of our suffering and could mean that omniscience cannot possibly be an attribute of God. Mill would say that if God is omniscient then surely he is aware of our suffering and would therefore intervene in the evil as he loves us all.
He was not able to convince the republicans to accept this treaty because he did not include them in on it. He did successfully campaign for this treaty by going around the nation but he ended up suffering a stroke and not be able to continue. Although Wilson collapsed on his successful tour, he motives must still be questioned. He did not follow the same ideals as the Founding Fathers at all. He went against them and tried to lead the world.
Another idea related to this is the idea of predestination which was the view of the philosopher- John Calvin. Predestination is the idea that our lives are set/planned out previous to the start of our lives. Calvin said that man is “inherently evil and is not capable of good as his free will chooses to reject God”. Therefore, this suggests that God has predestined our lives as to those who will be saved and who will not. This further reinforces that we have no choice or influence on our lives and the events that happen, so therefore God will know the ethical decisions we will make as he has already predestined them in our lives.
Socrates uses a rather elaborate argument to show this definition is also insufficient. If the gods approve of something because it is holy, their approval cannot be what makes it holy, he says. If an act is holy because the gods approve of it, we still do not know what makes it holy or why the gods approve. It seems that any attempt to define holiness by the will or approval of the gods is bound to fail. Even in contemporary society, we tend to associate morality with some kind of divine will, but through the Euthyphro, Socrates seems to suggesting we think along another line altogether.
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. It would limit free will, and limited free will is not free will. The reason why it would be impossible for good to exist without evil existing is that we need evil to exist so that we can define it and understand what it is and how it works. After we find out that information, we could base what good is off of what evil is not, which is what we do now with
He doesn’t believe in a moral definition of what is good and bad; because historically it is contradicted by the men of power. Within these two different approaches I believe that Aquinas’ God and Nietzsche’s will of power in human affairs essentially becomes the morality by which we come to understand morality. Aquinas first claims that God’s existence is not itself, self-evident because we do not know the essence of God (Aquinas 3). Instead, he states we can prove Gods’ existence through the things that are in themselves already self-evident to us. Aquinas provides five predicates for God as the Immovable motor of all movement, the uncaused Cause of all causes and effects, the necessary and supremely perfect being from which all beings relate, and supreme Intelligence which governs the actions of all beings (Aquinas 4-6).