Philosophy Hales TIP - Chapter 3, Chapter 4,

Atheists

Judging that there is no God actively

two criticisms of faith as belief without reason

"i just know it's true": still doesn't do much to justify belief Religion based on faith: would not be based on reason. its belief without reason

In Paley's presentation of the Argument from Design, he argued that the universe is analogous to a...

Watch. when we look around the universe we see incredible complesity and orderliness

if determinism is false

incompatibilism - either we have free will or determinism is false; some things just happen for no reason at all, they are uncaused and undetermined by what happened before.

In the cosmological argument

is more than a mere hypothesis that a divine power created everything - aristotle 1. everything is caused by something prior in the causal chain 2. it is absurd to think that the chain of causation can go back infinitely 3. thus there has to be some uncaused thing at the beginning that started the whole chain of causation 4. the uncaused thing is God

Problems of the attributes for the Cosmological Argument is

provides reasons to think that the first cause has even one of these attributes (omnipotent, omniscience, omnibenevolent

Compatibilism is the thesis that

your performance of an action is free just in case it is the result of your beliefs, desires, and intentions.

Libertarian free will is defined as

your will is free just in case you can choose to perform one action instead of another

Agent Causation is an attempt to

suppose that you are the first cause, the originator of causal chains, insulated from the larger world

Antagonists

withholding judgement about existence of God because there isn't enough evidence or information to have an informed judgement and so refuse to believe there is a God and also refuse to believe that there isn't one

According to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities

you are morally responsible for your action x only if at the time you did x, there was alternate possible action y that you could have done instead.

According to Paley

1. Everything in the universe is organized, detailed, complex, and precise. 2. Nothing explains this complexity and order except intelligent design. 3. If it is the result of design, then there must be a designer 4. the designer is God

One objection to the Cosmological Argument is...

1. Inconsistency - Everything can be random since if some things come into existence for no reason at all (they are uncaused) 2. Problems of the attributes - omnipotent, omniscience, omnibenevolent 3. Alternative science explanations - The big bang model, the entire universe was once infintely dense and very tiny; then it rapidly expanded, and eventually turned into everything there is. attempt to offer God as an explanation of the origins of the universe but isn't going to work if it only replaces one mystery with something more mysterious

An Objection to Pascal

1. Unforced Wagering 2. The Odds of God 50-50 3. Assumes loads of Christian Theology without Argument 4. The value of your life 5. an alternate ending 6. the problem of other gods 7. the involuntarism of belief and self-deception - wagering god exists is not the same as believing that he exists

The problem with divine foreknowledge

1. assumes there is an omniscient God 2. If God is omniscient, then he infallibly knows every fact about the past, present, and future 3. therefore God infallibly knows every fact about the past, present, and future 4. therefore, God infallibly knows everything that you will do, every action you will perform, and everything that will happen to you 5. if God infallibly knows everything that you will do then it is impossible for you to do anything other than what God knows you will do; you have no choice 6. therefore you have no choice in what you will do 7. if you have no choice in what you do, then you are not free. 8. therefore you have no free will

difficulties of appealing to scripture or testimony as evidence that God exists

1. most of the historical claims in the bible can be proven to be true by modern archaeology and historical study 2. if the historical claims dates places battles kings cities are true, then the religious claims are probably true therefore religious claims are probably true In, sum the arguement from scripture faces a dilemma. Assuming that a religious scriptre is deivinely inspired presupposes that God exists. presupposing that god exists is not a very convincing, or logically cogent, way to argue that he does not assuming that a religous scripture is divinely inspired means that its accuracy is to be assessed in the same way any ancient tale is evaluated, namely the best tecnique of modern historiography that we posses. the conclusion is that appeal to scripture does not seem to be a very promising way to prove god's existence.

According to the regress of reason for acting argument

1. you always act according to your greatest desire 2. your desires and their relative strengths are outside of your control 3. therefore your actions are outside of your control 4. if your actions are outside of your control, then they are not the result of your choices 5. therefore your actions are not the result of your choices 6. if your actions are not the result of your choices then you have no free will 7. therefore you have no free will

Pascal claimed that

1. you bet that there is a God, and he really does exist. You win. 2. You bet that there is a God, and he does not exist. You lose. 3. You bet against God's existence, there is no God. you win. 4. You bet against God's existence and there is a God after all. You lose your wager.

According to Pascal

1. you must make a decision as to wether God exists 2. The odds for his existence are 50-50 3. If God exists and you believe, then you win big by believing 4. If God exists and you do not believe, then you lose big by not believing 5. If God does not exist and you believe, then you lose nothing by believing. 6. If God does not exist and you do not believe, you gain nothing by not believing 7. therefore, it is in your rational self interest to wager that God exists.

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 perfection because it isn't a property at all, much less one that comes in degrees or optimal quantities

Gaunilo objected "on behalf of the fool" is that....

He mean that only a fool will doubt God's existence or the awesomeness of the ontological argument: 1. the concept of the lost island that is of the most perfect island imaginable 2. either the lost island is purely imaginary or the lost island is real 3. it is more perfect to exist than not to exist 4. therefore purely imaginary lost island is less perfect that a real lost island 5. therefore a purely imaginary lost island does not correspond to the concept of the lost island, which is the most perfect island 6. therefore the lost island is real

A reason to reject global determinism

Physical & Chemical laws is that they just are certain kinds of generalized descriptions of causal regularities, that if everything were random then there would be no physical laws - kryton-85 radioactive decay

The free will defense against the problem of evil maintains that

The atheist rightly observe all the suffering, pain, and misery in the world, but then make the mistake of blaming God for it. Suffering is not God's fault, it is our fault. We are the ones who have freely chosen to disobey God and ignore his rules and commandments. When we sin, yes it leads to suffering that should be no surprise.

St. Anselm of Canterbury argued that

The basic idea of the argument is that existence is part of the very nature of what it is to be God, and to conceive of God at all is to realize that he must exist

According to the argument from religious pluralism

The observation that there have been thousands of gods believed in by human societies all over the world

The Digger Wasp

When the time comes for egg laying, the wasp Sphex builds a burrow for the purpose and seeks out a cricket which she stings in such a way as to paralyze but not kill it. She drags the cricket into the burrow, lays her eggs alongside, closes the burrow, then flies away, never to return. In due course the eggs hatch and the wasp grubs feed off the paralyzed cricket which has not decayed having been kept in the equvilant of deep freeze.

An objection to the Design Argument is

a. the watch looks strikingly out of place against the plain background of the forest floor... the watch is to the forest as the universe is to...what? b. the background conditions themselves are designed, the forest, trees, rocks are all part of the background designed by God. So the watch being there is nothing special or unusual. c. an inexplicable object exhibiting an order and form unlike the environment is evidence of the divine

Random actions

aren't under control of anything. more indicative of diminishing control, a loss of freedom, than a sign that we are free. is not the result of anything and so not the result of free will.

to answer the too much freedom objection, compatibilists need to explain

coercion in such a way that coerced acts aren't free ones, even though apparently you're always acting on your desires, even at gunpoint

Determinism is the Global thesis that

everything is determined; to reject it we need only show that some events are not determined.

If compatibilist freedom requires the ability to act on your desires, then an objection

is that it means that the facts about the world imply that we are still not free. one avenue for the campatibilist is to draw a distinction between those desires that are a part of one's own intrinisc character and those are the result of mainpulation or coercion

if faith is no more than belief without evidence or reason, then....

it still doesn't do much to justify belief

Pascal argued that

it was in your rational self-interest to believe that God exists. Gambling and the payoffs if there is a God

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...

just hang around with the christians, go to mass, take sacraments, and eventually you'll come around. You sould just fake it until you make it. It is that a logical, rational solution to the problem of the involuntariness of belief, or a sort of self-dection and brainwashing

The distinction between moral and natural evils are really God's fault is

moral evil - murder, war, rape, torture, theft, deception, assault, etc natural evils - disease, floods, famines, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanoes, etc

In the classical tradition of natural theology, God is a being who is...

omnipotent, omniscience, and omnibenevolent

If moral responsibility requires that we always have a choice in what we do then,

one was intuitively still responsible for an action, even when one's action was completely unavoidable

The Magic Objection to the agent causation theory of free will claims

that human beings stand apart from the web of causation that holds everything else; our actions are free and uncaused, while our actions are uncaused, we can cause things, we can begin a whole new chain of causation

Aristotle's way out of the divine foreknowledge is

that there is no facts about the future. Aristotle argued that a. either there will be a sea battle tomorrow or there wont be (true) b. there will be a sea battle tomorrow (no truth value; neither true or false) c. there will be no sea battle tomorrow. God's omniscience does not extend to the future because there is nothing to know. Since there are no truths about the future for him to know, it is no limitation on his omniscience to say that God doesn't know what the future brings.

Paley argues that if you found a watch in the woods...

that you would naturally conclude that someone designed and made the watch, and that the watch was designed and there was intelligence behind its manufacture

If the historical claims in an ancient text are verified by modern archeology and historiography, then...

the conclusion is that appeal to scripture does not seem to be a every promising way to prove God

According to the problem of evil

the manifest existence of all the world's suffering shows that there cannot be an omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent God if there is suffering. 1. suppose that there is a God who is the 3 o's 2. The world is filled with suffering and misery 3. since God is omniscient, he knows about human and animal suffering and misery 4. Since God is omnipotent, he could effortlessly prevent such suffering if he wanted to 5. Anyone knows about suffering and could effortlessly prevent it but doesn't do so, is not perfectly good. 6. Therefore, God is not perfectly good. 7. This contradicts (1) therefore there is no God

if determinism is true

then the future is closed; there is only one way things could go

according to contemporary neuroscientist and psychologist like libet and wegner

we confuse causation with correlation

The contention that either we have no free will or determinism is false

we have no free will