Philosophy Chapter 3
If faith is no more than belief without evidence or reasons, then
believing something based on solely faith is unjustified.
According to Pascal
if God exists and you wager he exists, then you win big.
Paley argues that if you found a watch in the woods
you could tell the watch was man-made and designed.
In the Cosmological Argument,
-Everything is caused by something prior in the causal chain but it can't go on forever. -One uncaused thing had to begin the whole chain of Causation. -The uncaused thing is God.
One reason to suppose that even moral evils are really God's fault is
-God irresponsibly created and set loose violent people, knowing the damage they would probably cause
An objection to Pascal's Wager is that
-You do lose something by believing in God. -The odds are not 50-50. -If the odds are long enough, betting on God is losing something, and so not a good bet. -You can't choose beliefs. -There are more choices, so there is no clear best bet.
According to the argument from religious pluralism,
-if you had been born and raised in a different culture, you would believe in different gods than what you currently believe in -you have no more reason to prefer your god over those other gods -it is inconsistent to believe that thousands of other gods are fake and your alone is real when you have no reason for the preference -you should believe that all gods are phony
An objection to the Design Argument is
-that we have no reason to believe that the designer is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent -there might be more that one designer -God is supposed to be the source of all order, but then nothing explains the orderliness and complexity of God -There are competing scientific theories, like evolution through natural selection, that explains how order can arise without appealing to a designer
Gaunilo objected "on behalf of the fool" is that
-the Ontological argument apparently shows the existence of a perfect Lost Island just as well as it proves the existence of God. -But it is absurd to think the Lost Island really exists, so the reasoning of the Ontological argument is bad.
St. Anselm of Canterbury argued that
-the concept of God is the most perfect being imaginable -a real God is more perfect than an imaginary God -Therefore God is real
According to the problem of evil,
-the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God is incompatible with all the suffering in the world
Pascal argued that
It's in your rational self-interest to believe God exists.
According to Paley
Nothing explains the complexity of the universe except intelligent design.
In the classical tradition of natural theology, God is a being who is
Omnipotent (all powerful), Omniscient (all knowing), and Omnibenevolent (morally perfect)
Agnostics
People who claim that God's existence cannot be known.
Atheists
People who deny the existence of God
Pascal claimed that
The odds for God's existence are 50-50
A defender of the problem of evil argument can concede that moral evils are the result of people freely choosing to act immorally but still ask
Why doesn't God intervene to stop immoral acts.
The distinction between moral and natural evils is designed to show that
even if human free will is to blame for moral evils, God is still to blame for natural evils
Problem of the Attributes for the Cosmological Argument is
even though God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, the Cosmological Argument provides no reason for the first cause to have any of these attributes.
If you assume that a religious scripture is divinely inspired, then
everything they contain is sacred, infallible, and any apparent errors are to be explained away by whatever means available.
According to Kant, the problem with the Ontological Argument is that it treats existence as a property. This is a mistake because
existence isn't a property. Only things that exist have properties. Things that don't exist don't have properties.
Pascal recognizes that it is difficult to voluntarily start believing in something merely because it is in your self-interest. So he recommends that you
fake it til you make it.
One objection to the Cosmological Argument is that
it's inconsistent when it states that everything has a cause, but then it states that God does't have a cause.
The stock market prediction scam
order can also come from unintelligent processes.
If the historical claims in an ancient text are verified by modern archeology and historiography, then
the religious claims are probably true.
The free will defense against the problem of evil maintains that
the suffering in the world is the fault of humans for humans choose to sin.
Another objection to the Cosmological Argument is that
there are alternate scientific explanations that contradict with the Cosmological Argument on the origin of the answer.
In Paley's presentation of the Argument from Design, he argued that the universe is analogous to a
watch.