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.
Anselm’s Ontological Argument states that one understands that God, as a being, cannot be conceived a greater. Anselm uses this psychology that if we conceive of such a being’s existence only in the understanding, a greater being could be conceived and also exists in reality (Anselm, p.169). He also goes on to say that it’s contradictory because we cannot conceive a greater being than God that it must exist (Anselm, p.169). Anselm then moves on to the admission that since one understands the concept of a being that cannot conceive a greater; God cannot be understood not to exist (Anselm, p.169). One example that Anselm used to back up his argument was a painter.
If God did create the difference between right and wrong then that means that for God, initially, there wasn’t a difference between to two. With that being said, it follows that it is not possible to say whether God is good or not. This is due to the fact that if right and wrong were God’s creation, then prior to his conception of the two ideas, they did not exist or apply to him. The writer then determines that it is unreasonable to assume that God has any relation to the creation of right and wrong while also saying that God is good. If God is assumed to be good, then all of his actions are good, and this would include the creation of right and wrong.
Recognising this reaffirms that God is more than we can ever imagine – he is ineffable, can never be described so we cannot say what they are not. Strengths of via negativa are that it allows things to be said about God without implying that the finite (humans) can grasp the infinite (God), it also asserts the claims of revelation, that God is good and then recognises goodness to be a human word and so must be negated by saying too that God is not good to
The idea of this has partially to do with the fact that Sartre was an atheist. He did not believe that there was any higher power or God that put humans on Earth. Because of this, humans do not discover their meaning but rather create it themselves. This philosophy is a more optimistic philosophy regarding existentialism and is good to follow because it shows that human beings are able to get the meaning that they want out of their own life instead of following a meaning that has been forced upon them since before birth. It also lets humans be responsible for the decisions they make.
Since nothing can move of its own accord, and nothing can change itself, there had to be something else which has no cause and had the ability to initiate the Universe. Aquinas said that this entity without a cause and the power to create a Universe had to be an ‘Unmoved Mover/ Prime Mover’. He surmised that this Prime Mover had to be God. This argument has some positive points, in the fact that the natural occurrence of movement plus change have been brought into it, which makes the argument seem valid and plausible. However,
Of the idea of God, Dewey said, "it denotes the unity of all ideal ends arousing us to desire and actions.” Jesus Christ had a different belief when it came to the existence of God and the increase of “human good”. Jesus believes that he is the son of God and that he is also God. That view differs from Dewey’s view all together because Dewey believes that that there was not personal God or Christ. “Education” that omits reference to Jesus’ role in this world is not education at all. (John 14:6) Jesus believed that God had communicated truth to all mankind through personal revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ and today Christians believe that God reveals himself through propositional, verbalized revelation of Himself in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible.
He is malevolent. Is God both able and willing? Then whence commeth the evil. If he is neither able nor willing then why call him god?” This is called the inconsistent triad; if God has all these Omni qualities then why does evil still remain on earth? Augustine’s soul deciding theodicy was the demonstration that God is not responsible for the existence of evil.
McCloskey is reminding atheists the ways theists argue for their belief in God. He is reminding atheists the reasons they believe that there is no God. He feels atheism is superior to theism; however; I find that his opinions only strengthen my belief that there is a God. Proof, as he states, carries no weight for a theist. 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.
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. Neitzche also said that everyone should strive to seek pleasure and success wherever it could be found, he also thought religious beliefs to be false. But what did Neitzche mean by God is ‘dead’? He felt that religious outlook is no longer credible for the modern intellectual person. He meant that humans had advanced their understanding of the natural world enough to realize that the literal teachings of the religions that espoused God were not true.