Richard Dawkins in his book the blind watchmaker however argues that this cannot be the case as there are so many faults in the world that it could not have been planned and that things came about through natural selection, the “blind, unconscious, automatic process" which explains the existence and purposeful form of all life. He also argues that if it was God who created the world then he did not do a very good job as there are so many faults which in turn cause us pain and suffering. This can the lead us to believe that god may not be all loving, all powerful and all knowing. As if he was all these things then he would know of suffering and be able to and would do something
Aquinas’ 3 ways make far too many leaps and assumptions. For Example, in the 2nd way – from Cause, the argument clearly states that everything has a cause, that cause must too have a cause, there cannot be an infinite number of causes therefore there must be an uncaused cause. The logic in this argument is sound however, when Aquinas makes the leap from there being an uncaused cause to that uncaused cause being God this is where I feel it falls. This leap is unjustified and therefore I don’t feel it is sufficient to be convincing as proof to the existence of God. Bertrand Russell would argue against the 2nd way with fallacy of composition.
The form is everlasting therefore meaning it is in a different reality. So to Plato we gain true objective knowledge through a priori because our senses disguising the truth. To Plato the realm of the forms is more important than the realm of appearances because the forms have an unchanging nature which makes them in many ways more real. The things we see in our world are only shadows of the forms, meaning we don’t see the whole object/truth but only an outline. An example of this is the concept of beauty.
what we call sensible qualities. Berkeley’s response is that he cannot make sense of the notion of a material substance and this is largely due to the fact that the supposed material substance and the nature of our ideas occasion fundamentally different properties and thus it is unclear how a material substance can support our ideas. Consequently, this paper will attempt to substantiate such a notion and argue that belief in the existence of a material substance offers a better explanation of the phenomena of being conscious of an external world than Berkeley’s idealism. In his First Dialogue, Berkeley attempts to quench atheism and skepticism by aiming to retain a philosophy of common sense. In this attempt, he makes the claim that there is no such thing as what philosophers call material substance.
He thinks that Aquinas had made an error in linking cause and effect – as have any other humans that have done the same. Cause and effect are two completely different things, linked incorrectly in the mind by induction. Hume argues that because of this error, there is no cause and effect chain and therefore, no first cause. He argues that we have no direct experience of the creation of the universe and so we cannot speak meaningfully about it. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) agrees with the idea that we cannot try to comprehend something outside of our reach – we can
The lack of clarification for the term “proofs” does a disservice to McCloskey’s opening. The very things he considers “proofs” to the theist are in most studious circles actually considered “arguments” for the case of theism not “proofs”. It may appear the he is attempting to run it altogether to misdirect the reader into believing something that is not. McCloskey refers to the arguments as proofs and he often implies that they can’t definitively establish the case for God, but the Cumulative Case using the Cosmological Argument, the creator, the Teleological Argument, the intelligent designer and the Moral Argument, that He is a personal, morally perfect being is the best explanation that God exists which is the best explanation for the universe we experience. The claims of science aren’t a hundred percent indisputable or even a hundred percent factual and yet they are still accepted as valid, rationally convincing or highly probable, thus the belief in theism doesn’t have to be irrefutable to be accepted as the same.
Justice is a term that is used and defined in many ways. Therefore, if justice exists, why can it not exist within a codified constitution? The area in which Plato’s logic falls short on the subject of codified constitutions is that Plato does not take into account the differences that arise from an individualistic world versus a communal one. In the Phaedrus, Plato speaks of a universal truth which should be our ultimate guiding principle (248a-c). However, this universal truth is only known by the individual, who is incapable of knowing that truth until that exact moment that it presents itself.
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. Plotinus, Moses Maimonides, Pseudo-Dionysius and Meister Eckhart support this view – for these philosophers the real God is beyond whatever we speak of as God. Human language causes confusion when it is used to talk about God, as a result we must speak of God only by saying what God is not. Human language is inadequate in describing God – we cannot talk about God. 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.
The World of the Forms is a myth made up by Plato The world of the forms is a theory by Plato, who suggested that the world we perceive is not the real world, but an imperfect version of it. Ours is a copy of the world of the forms. There doesn’t seem to be much empirical evidence for it, which does give credence to the idea that it was just a myth but Plato did argue that there was some hard evidence behind it. He said that we know everything already and learning isn’t learning, rather recalling what you already know and this is proof of the forms. He apparently proved this by getting an uneducated slave boy to answer a maths question correctly.
His skepticism exists because a priori “truths” exist don’t necessarily pertain to the real, material world. Knowledge gained by experience is also suspect for Hume. He believes that knowledge gained by experience is unfounded because inductive reasoning is based on the habit of constant conjunction, or the assumption that patterns from the past will repeat themselves in the future. He is skeptical about this because the argument for inductive reasoning is circular—you have to assume the conclusion (that inductive reasoning is a reliable method of acquiring knowledge) to reach the conclusion. In other words, it is necessary to use inductive reasoning to prove inductive reasoning.