Chapter 12 Is There a God?
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Transcript Chapter 12 Is There a God?
Chapter 12: Is There a
God?
Introduction
Can the existence of God be proven?
Philosophy of religion – philosophical study of
a wide variety of religious issues
Theology – “study of God”
Revealed theology – claims human knowledge
of God comes through special revelations such
as the Bible or Qur’an
Natural theology – knowledge of God is
possible based on “natural” reason, unaided by
special revelation
Theism – religious notion of ultimate reality
based on God
Arguments for God’s Existence
Cosmological arguments – argues from the existence
of the universe to the existence of God as its cause,
creator, or explanation
Aristotle argued from the existence of motion to the
Unmoved Mover as the explanation of motion
Aristotle’s principles:
– Something cannot be the cause of itself
– Something cannot come from nothing
– There cannot be an infinite series of cause and effects
Kalam – “speech” in Arabic; denotes the statement of
points in theological doctrine; Islamic thought about
God’s existence in relation to the created universe
The Five Ways
St. Thomas Aquinas
5 Arguments for the existence of God:
– Argument from motion
– There must be a First Efficient Cause
– Argument of possibility and necessity- What caused
something to exist from nothing, other than
something that did not have to be created?
– There must be something which is to all beings the
cause of their being, goodness, and every other
perfection
– Some intelligent being exists which gives natural
things a purpose or design
The Kalam Argument from Islam
William Craig
Modern version of the kalam argument
Concludes that the existence of the
universe has a cause
Syllogism for the need for a first cause:
– Everything that begins to exist has a cause of
its existence
– The universe began to exist
– Therefore the universe has a cause for its
existence
Problems with the Cosmological
Argument
Gunapala Dharmasiri
The Buddha did not think that one needed
the idea of a creator God to explain the
existence of the world
The causes of what exists can be found
within the world itself
Creationism vs. Evolution
Teleological argument – argument from design; the
universe exhibits order which is due to a supreme, divine
intelligence
William Paley (1743 – 1805) saw the universe as a vast,
harmonious, interconnected order designed for a
purpose
David Hume criticizes the teleological argument
– Universe is not sufficiently like the productions of human design
to support the argument
– We would have to be able to compare our universe to another in
order to decide if it was designed or simply grew on its own
– An effect must be proportionate to its cause: Because the
universe is imperfect, its cause must be imperfect
Charles Darwin published On the Origin of the Species in
1859
– The order nature exhibits is the result of evolutionary processes
The Blind Watchmaker
Richard Dawkins
Argues for neo-Darwinian views of evolution
Argues that evolution uses the process of
cumulative selection, as opposed to single-step
selection, which explains how we now have an
ordered, intelligent universe
– Single-step selection – filters all items once and for all
– Cumulative selection – filters repeatedly, passing on
some of the results of the first selection onto the next
and so forth
Why Do Babies Suffer?
Problem of evil – why does evil exist;
how can one harmonize the existence of
evil with the existence of a perfectly good,
all-powerful, and all-knowing God?
According to Aquinas, because God is
infinitely good and all-powerful, he can
bring good out of evil
God and the Problem of Evil
B. C. Johnson
Takes the concrete situation of a sixmonth-old baby painfully burning to death
to demonstrate that traditional attempts to
explain why God allows evil seem
inadequate
Are we making excuses for God and
allowing him to get away with behavior we
would not tolerate from other humans?
The Gender of God
Beyond God the Father
Mary Daly
Believes that human symbols and
concepts of God have reinforced sexism