Download Chapter 12 Is There a God?

Chapter 12: Is There a
God?
Introduction
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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
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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
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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
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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:
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– 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
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Creationism vs. Evolution
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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
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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
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– 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?
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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?
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The Gender of God
Beyond God the Father
Mary Daly
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Believes that human symbols and
concepts of God have reinforced sexism