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.