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.
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.
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.
Kant proclaims “the belief that we have cognition of something through experience which we in fact cannot accept as happening according to objective laws of experience (faith in miracles)”(p.185). He credits faith's mass appeal and staying power as the main reason for the growth of corrupted notions of miracles and saving grace. Kant was not a believer that accepting Jesus Christ as our savior would be all that is needed in Christian grace to free oneself from sin. Kant says “It is totally inconceivable, however, how a rational human being who knows himself to deserve punishment could seriously believe that he only has to believe the news of satisfaction having been rendered Page 1 for him, and accept it utiliter, in order to regard his guilt as done away with” (p. 123). These ideas of Kant seem to imply he is not a believer of Jesus or that miracles have never happened, the idea Kant is developing that miracles are not necessary for us to develop moral
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.
This argument is very important for religious believers, but has come under criticism from those who do not believe, who say that it is flawed. Gaunilo, and Immanuel Kant, feel that we will never have the answer to this question due to our human limitations, and reason. . St. Anselm’s first form of the argument is that God is “that than which none greater can be conceived”. This means that no one can think of anything that is greater than God.
Word Count: 1093 Carli Kozik God is Not Related to Morality In the following essay, I will argue that God is not related to morality, and I will accomplish this in three steps. First of all, I will present the Divine Justice Theory and explain why I find it to be the most plausible view of how God could be related to morality. Next, I will present the argument given for the Divine Justice Theory. And lastly, I will argue that the Divine Justice Theory fails by attacking the premises of the argument and explaining how morality can exist without God. In the following two paragraphs, I will present the Divine Justice Theory, or DJT, as I will be referring to it throughout the rest of my paper, and explain why it is the most plausible view of how God could be related to morality.
‘The universe needs no explanation.’ Discuss. (10 marks) Christian philosopher St Thomas Aquinas would have disagreed with this statement as he was the one that put the cosmological argument forward which questions the universe and how it came into existence. Aquinas would have maintained his view as he believes that everything that is in motion has been caused by something else and he believes that this something else is God. He also claims that God is the first cause as he is the one that caused the universe to come into existence and continues to keep it in motion. He would continue to disagree with this statement because he claimed that because everything in the universe is contingent, it must mean that the universe as a whole must have a cause behind it.
George Berkeley’s Argument for the Existence of God: A Critical Analysis By Michelle Mahlik Introduction In The Principles of Human Knowledge, George Berkeley attempts to present a form of idealism that does not reject the external existence of the world and the existence of finite spirits and God in order to avoid being dubbed a subjective idealist. D.M. Datta, in his article “Berkeley’s Objective Idealism: An Indian view”[1], asserts that Berkeley’s objective idealism and his belief in God as an Infinite Spirit who is separate and distinct from finite human spirits cannot be upheld in light of Berkeley’s stringent rejection of abstract ideas. It is upon the rejection of abstraction that Berkeley’s argument against the existence of matter rests. Yet Berkeley, in Datta’s view, seems to employ the very notion he so adamantly denied in his endeavor to prove the existence of God.
For our purposes, theism will be defined as belief in the existence of God, as defined above. Atheism, then, is the “critique and denial of the major claims of all varieties of theism” (Nagel 168). These two views provide metaphysical arguments concerning the nature of man and God. A third commonly held belief about the existence of God is known as agnosticism. Agnosticism is the purely epistemological stance that sufficient evidence does not exist for or against theism therefore the best stance on the argument is no stance at all.