Therefore, believing God to encompass all of these traits would leave anyone in their right mind wondering how anything bad could ever happen in the world. Some suggest that accepting two of these three qualities allows for the possibility of evil. For example evil could thrive if God were omniscient and omnibenevolent, but not omnipotent. God would then be all-knowing of the evil that takes place. Also, he would crave goodness in the world.
Hence, it doesn’t exist. Following the above, everything God creates is therefore perfect, hence omnipotent, a quality coherent to the attributes of the god of theism. Again, Augustine attempts to take the blame off God by saying that evil is committed by humanity’s abuse of free will. Yet, God couldn’t have created humans without free will because the point of our existence would be lost, as free will differentiates humans and gives us individuality – it gives our life meaning and purpose. If we were not given free will, the lack of freedom and choice would render us similar to robots.
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.
The two definitions of omniscient each raise different problems, the former raises questions about God’s omnipotence, as one needs to assess if the laws of nature can limit an omnipotent God. The latter raises problems as, if He exists outside of time as an eternal creator and knows the past, present and future simultaneously, do we still have free will? Problems to God’s omniscience highlighted in Book 5 is Molina who states that God does not interfere with humans choices or decisions, but merely observes all possible outcomes and thus sees the past, present and future simultaneously, fitting with an eternal God. Aquinas gives the image of a man standing on a mountain and witnessing the whole road and everything that happens on it and the various paths we may take. However, it is important to note how the man on the mountain does not influence any choices and so just because one sees what is happening, this does not mean that it in any way influences the decisions made.
Explain the different understandings of the role of God which are found in Aquinas’ cosmological argument The cosmological argument was not set about to prove the existence or the role of God. The initial purpose of the cosmological argument was to answer the question ‘How did the universe come into existence?’ The role of God isn’t totally explained within the cosmological argument, but characteristics about the role of God are found in various variations of the cosmological argument. Aquinas’s three ways establish many of these codes and characteristics. The God mentioned in each of the cosmological arguments is the God of classical theism. Each of Aquinas’s three ways established a different role of God.
Critically assess the Cosmological argument for the existence of God. The Cosmological argument infers an existence of a God from looking at the cosmos and the phenomena within it. Many philosophers and prominent thinkers have either rejected the claim that the creator of the universe is God, or have refuted St Thomas Aquinas’ thinking and reasoning in his 3 ways of proving Gods existence which constitutes the cosmological argument; as outlined in ‘Summa Theologica’. These criticisms are what I am going to be examining throughout this essay. One of Aquinas’ ways of proving God’s existence; ‘the uncaused causer’, states that every cause in the universe has an effect, the chain of cause and effect must have a terminus to avoid infinite regress.
Stacey Snyder Professor McMichael Introduction to Philosophy April 08, 2014 Paley’s Teleological Argument In this paper, I will be discussing Paley’s teleological argument for the existence of God. This is a valid argument but in my opinion it is not enough to prove the existence of God. I believe that even if all the premises are true and they relate to the conclusion, which they do, that the argument can still be proven wrong by other theories. Paley’s teleological arguments, also called the design argument, attempts to prove that God exists by proving that God created the earth and created humans. Paley’s version of the argument is commonly recognized by the “watchmaker” analogy which is as follows.
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.
THEOLOGY ESSAY A)EXPLAIN THE KEY IDEAS OF THE DESIGN ARGUMENT AND GIVE REASONS WHY SOME PHILOSOPHERS REJECTED THIS ARGUMENT FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD. The Design argument looks at the order and purpose, or telos, in the world and states that it implies that there must be a designer who made the world ‘just right’ for human existence. Religious believers go on to state that this designer is God. The argument states that if one uses one’s senses to look at order, such as gravity and the motion of the planets, which exists in the world, it is likely that one will accept that there is a designer God who created the world and gave it this order. Thus, the argument is a posteriori, based on experience, and inductive, containing a conclusion that
J. Ayer claimed that to speak of a designed universe is meaningless. Unless we could say what the world would have been like without a designer, we cannot reach the conclusion that this world is designed. Who establishes that there is beneficial order in the universe? How do we argue from that to the conclusion that god has designed it? Swinburne counted this by claiming that the order in the universe does require an explanation.