Philosophy 110 Ch. 3
According to Pascal
if god exists and you wager that he does, then you win big
The stock market prediction scam
is and example of an unintelligent process that gives rise to order
Agnostics
withheld judgment about the existence of God
Paley argues that if you found a watch in the woods
you could tell that the watch, unlike the rocks, was designed and made
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
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
In the Cosmological Argument
-Everything is caused by something prior in the casual chain -There is a first cause
St. Anselm of Canterbury argued that
-a read God is more perfect than an imaginary God -the concept of God is that of the most perfect being imaginable
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
The Problem of the Attributes for the Cosmological Argument is
Aquinas gives no reasons to believe that the first cause i.e. omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent
The idea that suffering is part of God's greater plan is often taken to refute the logical problem of evil, by showing that
God might have some good reason as to why suffering is necessary and instrumental to our greater happiness
Pascal argued that
It is in your rational self-interest to believe that 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
Omniscient, Omnipotent, and Ombivenevolent
Another objection to Pascal's Wager is that the argument
Pascal assumes loads of Christian theology without arguing for it
The free will defense against the problem of evil maintains that
all suffering in the world is our fault because we freely choose to sin
According to Kant, the problem with the Ontological Argument is that it treats existence as a property. This is a mistake because
an object cannot have a bunch of properties except existence; a thing must exist to have any properties at all
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
Another objection to Pascal's Wager is that the argument
fails to single out any particular deity as the one deserving of your bet
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 until you make it
If you assume that a religious scripture is divinely inspired, then
it cannot serve as evidence of God's existence, since you have already presupposed that God exists
One objection to the Cosmological Argument is that
it is arbitrary to insist infinite chain of causes in an eternally existing universe is ridiculous, but an eternally existing God is not
If faith is no more than belief without evidence or reasons, then
it is not really within the domain of philosophy, which promotes having good reasons for belief
Atheists
judge that there is no God
According to the problem of evil,
the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God is incompatible with all the suffering in the world
Pascal claimed that
the odds for God's existence are 50-50
One objection to the Ontological Argument, that Gaunilo raised "on behalf of the fool" is that
the reasoning of the Ontological Argument apparently proves the existence of a perfect Lost Island just as well as it proves the existence of God
Another objection to the Cosmological Argument is that
there is a competing scientific explanation of the origin of the universe that does not require a creator God
In Paley's presentation of the Argument from Design, he argued that the universe is analogous to a
watch
If the historical claims in an ancient text are verified by modern archeology and historiography, then
we still have no reason to believe any religious or supernatural claims made in the text
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 didn't God intervene to prevent the Holocaust anyway?
