Transcript Metaphysics

Is there a rational basis for the belief in God.
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Metaphysics is the study of ultimate reality.
Common sense can fool us.
So metaphysics set out to explore what is
beyond the physical.
What might these questions be?
Metaphysics deals with questions about the
essence and the existence of things. What is
the true nature of reality.
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St Thomas Aquinas.
Believed everything had two principles which
explain its being.
A things essence is its whatness.
This is independent of a particular existence.
e.g essence of a frog is its frogness.
We can know what makes up a frogs- ness
without thinking about a particular frog.
Existence is completely different from essence.
Essentially to say what a frog is and to say that a
frog is, are completely different statements.
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Metaphysics is concerned with what there is
or what we refer to by using such terms as
‘reality’, ‘being’ and ‘existence’, beyond the
physical nature of these terms.
Most people rely on common sense or a
religious authority to answer them.
But philosophers try to build up a picture of
the structure of reality based on reason and
logic.
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As we have seen before common sense can
get it wrong.
From a common sense point of view we may
think that the sun orbits the earth but we
would be wrong, on further scientific
inspection the earth goes round the sun.
Common sense realism is the view that the
world is just as it appears to be. But there
are a lot of problems with this.
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Since we are concerned with beyond the
physical, this question rates high on the list
of questions that metaphysics attempts to
answer.
Theology and metaphysics share a common
interest, they both interested in finding proof
of God’s existence.
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In philosophy we are not talking about a God
of a particular religion but God as a word that
means creator, causer, intelligence, sustainer
of the universe.
the arguments that philosophers
consider,examine whether it is reasonable to
suppose there is such a being.
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The many arguments for the existence of God
fall into two types: A priori and A posteriori.
A priori: prior to experience.
These are arguments we can make independently
of our experiences. They don’t have to be
confirmed by our experience.
Things we can work out without using our senses
at all; just thinking will suffice. We know that a
triangle must have three sides, even if we never
saw one, because this is something which is true
by definition. We know that parallel lines will
never meet because if they did they would not be
parallel. Knowledge that we know to be true
without using our senses, but just by thought is
termed apriori knowledge. To a large extent
Mathematics and logic deal in apriori knowledge.
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These are arguments from our experiences and our
senses.
They have to be confirmed by our experience.
These arguments come after experience.
For example: all swans are white.
We have to examine all swans in the world to know if
this is right. So then we can justify our statement.
Then we see it is untrue by our discovery of a black
swan.
Note: A Posteriori statements can only be justified with
reference to experience. That is, you have to find out
through experience whether it is true.