| Existence Of God |
Article Index for Existence |
Website Links For Existence |
Information AboutExistence Of God |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT EXISTENCE OF GOD | |
| atheism | |
| arguments against the existence of god | |
| arguments for the existence of god | |
| agnosticism | |
| controversies | |
| philosophical arguments | |
| philosophy of religion | |
| theology | |
| god | |
| singular god | |
|
Arguments for and against the existence of God have been proposed by philosophers, theologians, and others. In Philosophical terminology, existence of God arguments concern schools of thought on the Epistemology of the Ontology of God . The debate concerning the existence of God raises many philosophical issues. A basic problem is that there is no universally accepted definition of God. Some definitions of God's existence are so non-specific that it is certain that ''something'' exists that meets the definition; in stark contrast, there are suggestions that other definitions are self-contradictory. Arguments for the existence of God typically include Metaphysical , Empirical , Inductive , and Subjective types. Arguments against the existence of God typically include empirical, Deductive , and inductive types. Viewpoints represented include Atheism , either no belief in God or the view that God does not exist; Theism , the view that God exists; and Agnosticism , the view that whether or not God exists is unknown or unknowable. Although once regarded as a non-issue in much of western academia, the question of the existence of God is now subject to lively debate both in philosophysee eg ''The Rationality of Theism'' quoting Quentin Smith "God is not 'dead' in academia; he returned to life in the late 1960s". They cite "the shift from hostility towards theism in Paul Edwards's ''Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (1967) to sympathy towards theism in the more recent Routledge Encyclopedia Of Philosophy and in popular culture.Consider the sales and lively discussion of a whole raft of recent books arguing for and against theism, such as The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and The Language Of God by Francis Collins PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES Definition of God's existence See Also: Definition God Deity Ontology Today in the West, the term "'s Ontological Argument from which the classical properties may be deduced.See Swinburne's ''Does God Exist?'' or Polkinghorne By contrast Pantheists do not believe in a personal God. For example, Spinoza and his philosophical followers (such as Einstein ) use the term 'God' in a particular philosophical sense, to mean (roughly) the essential substance/principles of Nature.See the articles on them, and especially Einstein's 1940 paper in Nature In the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism, reality is ultimately seen as being a single, qualityless, changeless being called Nirguna Brahman . However, nirguna Brahman is understood to be beyond "ordinary" human comprehension.1 What we ordinarily perceive - that is, a world of many things - is brought on by consequences of our actions. Thus, Advaitin philosophy introduces the concept of saguna Brahman or Ishvara as a way of talking about Brahman to people. Ishvara, in turn, is ascribed such qualities as omniscience, omnipotence, and benevolence. Polytheistic religions use the word " God " for multiple beings with varying degrees of power and abilities. Some Stories such as those of Homer and Ovid portray gods arguing with, tricking and fighting with one another. Epistemology See Also: Epistemology Sociology of knowledge Epistemology is the branch of philosophy which studies the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge. One cannot be said to "know" something just because one believes it. Knowledge is, from an epistemological standpoint, distinguished from Belief by Justification . Knowledge in the sense of " Understanding of a Fact or Truth " can be divided in '' A Posteriori '' knowledge, based on Experience or Deduction (see Methodology ), and '' A Priori '' knowledge from Introspection , Axiom s or Self-evidence . Knowledge can also be described as a Psychological state, since in a strict sense there can never be ''a posteriori'' knowledge proper (see Relativism ). Much of the disagreement about "proofs" of God's existence is due to different conceptions not only of the term "God" but also the terms "proof", "truth" and "knowledge". Religious Belief from Revelation or Enlightenment ( Satori ) falls in the second, ''a priori'' class of "knowledge". Different conclusions as to the existence of God often rest on different criteria for deciding what methods are appropriate for deciding if something is true or not; some examples include
The problem of the supernatural One problem posed by the question of the existence of a god is that traditional beliefs usually ascribe to God various Supernatural powers. Supernatural beings may be able to conceal and reveal themselves for their own purposes, as for example in the tale of Baucis And Philemon . In addition, according to most concepts of God, God is not part of the natural order, but the ultimate creator of nature and of the scientific laws. Religious apologists offer the supernatural nature of God as one explanation of the inability of Empirical Methods to decide the question of God's existence. In Karl Popper's Philosophy Of Science , the assertion of the existence of a supernatural God would be a Non-falsifiable Hypothesis , not in the domain of scientific investigation. The Non-overlapping Magisteria view proposed by Stephen Jay Gould also holds that the existence (or otherwise) of God is beyond the domain of science. Proponents of Intelligent Design (I.D.) believe there is empirical evidence for Irreducible Complexity pointing to the existence of an intelligent creator, though their claims are challenged by most in the scientific community. Even some scientifically literate theists appear to have been impressed by the observation that certain natural laws and universal constants seem "fine-tuned" to favor the development of life (see Anthropic Principle ). However, reliance on phenomena which have not yet been resolved by natural explanations may be equated to the pejorative God Of The Gaps . Logical Positivists , such as Rudolph Carnap and A. J. Ayer viewed any talk of gods as literally Nonsense . For the logical positivists and adherents of similar schools of thought, statements about religious or other transcendent experiences could not have a truth value, and were deemed to be without meaning. Nature of relevant Proofs/Arguments Since God (of the kind to which the Proofs/Arguments relate) is neither an entity in the Universe nor a mathematical object it is not obvious what kinds of arguments/proofs are relevant to God's existence. Even if the concept of scientific proof were not problematic, the fact that there is no conclusive scientific proof of the existence, or non-existence, of GodAgreed by everyone from Dawkins to Ward to Plantinga mainly demonstrates that the existence of God is not a normal scientific question. John Polkinghorne suggests that the nearest analogy to the existence of God in Physics are the ideas of Quantum Mechanics which are paradoxical but make sense of a great deal of disparate data.2 However you cannot do experiments on God, and, if God exists and is indeed the creator of reality, God created the laws of Physics and is not necessarily bound by them, so it will inevitably be more difficult to reason reliably about Godsee eg 3. Alvin Plantinga compares the question of the existence of God to the question of the existence of other minds: both of which are notoriously impossible to "prove" against a determined skepticsee his ''God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God'' Cornell (1990) ISBN 0801497353 and ''Warranted Christian Belief'' OUP (2000) ISBN 0195131932. One approach, suggested by writers such as May, 1998 Most of the arguments for, or against, the existence of God can be seen as pointing to particular aspects of the universe in this way. In almost all cases it is not seriously suggested by proponents of the arguments that they are irrefutable, merely that they make one worldview seem significantly more likely than the other. However since an assessment of the weight of evidence depends on the Prior Probability that is assigned to each worldview, arguments that a theist finds convincing may seem thin to an atheist and vice-versasee eg '' The Probability Of God '' by '' Stephen D. Unwin '' its criticism in The God Delusion , and the critical comment in That Article .. ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
Arguments from historical events or personages
Inductive arguments (for) Inductive arguments argue their conclusions through Inductive Reasoning .
Arguments from testimony (for) Arguments from testimony rely on the testimony or experience of certain witnesses, possibly embodying the propositions of a specific Revealed Religion . Swinburne argues that it is a principle of rationality that one should accept testimony unless there are strong reasons for not doing so.5
Arguments grounded in personal experience
ARGUMENTS AGAINST THE EXISTENCE OF GOD Each of the following arguments aims at showing that some particular conception of a god is either inherently meaningless, Contradictory , or contradicts known Scientific and/or Historical facts, and that therefore a god thus described does not exist. Empirical arguments (against) Empirical arguments depend on Empirical Data in order to prove their conclusions.
Deductive arguments (against) Deductive arguments attempt to prove their conclusions by Deductive Reasoning from true premises. These arguments inherently depend on specific definitions of the term "God".
Inductive arguments (against) Inductive arguments argue their conclusions through Inductive Reasoning .
Subjective arguments (against) Similar to the subjective arguments for the existence of God, subjective arguments against the supernatural mainly rely on the testimony or experience of witnesses, or the propositions of a Revealed Religion in general.
CONCLUSIONS Conclusions on the existence of God can be roughly divided into three camps: ''theist'', ''atheist,'' and ''agnostic''. Theism The Theistic conclusion is that the arguments indicate there are sufficient reasons to believe in the existence of God or gods. God exists and this can be demonstrated The '' Catechism Of The Catholic Church '', following the Thomist tradition and the dogmatic definition of the First Vatican Council , affirms that it is a doctrine of the Catholic Church that God's existence has been rationally demonstrated. For the proofs of God's existence by Saint Thomas Aquinas see Quinquae Viae . Many other Christian denominations share the view that God's existence can be demonstrated without recourse to claims of revelation. On beliefs of Christian faith, theologians and philosophers make a distinction between: #doctrines arising from Special Revelation that arise ''essentially'' from faith in divinely inspired revelations, including the life of Christ, but cannot be proved or even anticipated by reason alone, such as the doctrines of the Trinity or the Incarnation , and #doctrines arising from General Revelation , that is from reason alone drawing conclusions based on relatively obvious observations of the world and self. The argument that the existence of God can be known to all, even prior to exposure to any divine revelation, predates Christianity. St. Paul made this argument when he insisted that pagans were without excuse because "since the creation of the world {Link without Title} invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made". In this Paul alludes to the proofs for a Creator, later enunciated by St. ThomasFor the proofs of God's existence by Saint Thomas Aquinas see Quinquae Viae . and others, but that had also been explored by the Greek philosophers. Another apologetical school of thought, a sort of synthesis of various existing Dutch and American Reformed thinkers (such as, Abraham Kuyper , Benjamin Warfield , Herman Dooyeweerd ), emerged in the late 1920s. This school was instituted by Cornelius Van Til , and came to be popularly called Presuppositional Apologetics (though Van Til himself felt "Transcendental" would be a more accurate title). The main distinction between this approach and the more classical evidentialist approach mentioned above is that the Presuppositionalist denies any common ground between the believer and the non-believer, except that which the non-believer denies, namely, the assumption of the truth of the theistic worldview. In other words, Presuppositionalists don't believe that the existence of God can be proven by appeal to raw, uninterpreted (or, "brute") facts, which have the same (theoretical) meaning to people with fundamentally different worldviews, because they deny that such a condition is even possible. They claim that the only possible proof for the existence of God is that the very same belief is the necessary condition to the intelligibility of all other human experience and action. In other words, they attempt to prove the existence of God by means of appeal to the alleged Transcendental necessity of the belief -- indirectly (by appeal to the allegedly unavowed presuppositions of the non-believer's worldview) rather than directly (by appeal to some form of common factuality). In practice this school utilizes what have come to be known as Transcendental Arguments For The Existence Of God . In these arguments they claim to demonstrate that all human experience and action (even the condition of unbelief, itself) is a proof for the existence of God, because God's existence is the necessary condition of their intelligibility. God exists, but this cannot be demonstrated or refuted Others have suggested that the several logical and philosophical arguments for and against the existence of God miss the point. The word ''God'' has a meaning in human culture and history that does not correspond to the beings whose existence is supported by such arguments, assuming they are valid. The real question is not whether a "most perfect being" or an "uncaused first cause" exist; the real question is whether Yahweh or Vishnu or Zeus , or some other deity of attested human religion, exists, and if so, which deity. Most of these arguments do not resolve the issue of which of these figures is more likely to exist, although all empirical arguments suggest that none of them do. Blaise Pascal suggested this objection in his '' Pensées '' when he wrote "The God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob — not the god of the philosophers!", see also Pascal's Wager . Some Christians note that the Christian faith teaches " Salvation is by Faith ", NIV "But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus." (Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.) and that faith is reliance upon the faithfulness of God, which has little to do with the believer's ability to comprehend that in which he trusts. The most extreme example of this position is called Fideism , which holds that faith is simply the will to believe, and argues that if God's existence were rationally demonstrable, faith in His existence would become superfluous. In ''The Justification of Knowledge'', the Calvinist theologian Robert L. Reymond argues that believers should not attempt to prove the existence of God. Since he believes all such proofs are fundamentally unsound, believers should not place their confidence in them, much less resort to them in discussions with non-believers; rather, they should accept the content of revelation by faith. Reymond's position is similar to that of his mentor, Gordon Clark , which holds that all worldviews are based on certain unprovable first premises (or, Axioms ), and therefore are ultimately unprovable. The Christian theist therefore must simply choose to start with Christianity rather than anything else, by a "leap of faith". This position is also sometimes called Presuppositional Apologetics , but should not be confused with the Van Tillian variety discussed above. An intermediate position is that of Alvin Plantinga who holds that a specific form of Modal Logic and an appeal to world-indexed properties render belief in the existence of God rational and justified, even though the existence of God cannot be proven in a mathematical sense. Plantinga equates knowledge of God's existence with kinds of knowledge that are rational but do not proceed through proof, such as sensory knowledge.7 Atheism The Atheistic conclusion is that the arguments indicate there are insufficient reasons to believe in the existence of God or gods. Strong atheism , Omniscience , Omnipresence , Transcendence , Omnibenevolence ) is logically contradictory, incomprehensible, or absurd, and therefore that the non-existence of such a god is '' A Priori '' true. It needs to be noted that believing the qualities of a particular God to be contradictory is not the sole basis of strong atheist; many strong atheists would assert that, owing to the lack of evidence, even a god described in a manner that was not contradictory is still unlikely to exist. It should also be noted that many religions credit human achievements to God, many strong atheists consider this to be outrageous, and that human achievements are the result of millions of years of inspiration and innovation. Weak atheism The term Weak Atheism is used of those who do not believe that a god or gods exists. This is different from Agnosticism which states that the existence of God is either unknown or unknowable. There is some controversy in the use of this term. Richard Dawkins in '' The God Delusion '' uses the term "strong atheist" but not "weak atheist" The God Delusion p50 Agnosticism The term Agnosticism refers to the philosophical position that the existence of God is unknown, specifically in distinction from Theism and Atheism . A stronger form of this position, also called agnosticism, is that the question of whether or not God exists cannot be known - this is sometimes called "strong" agnosticism. This seems to have been the position of Thomas Huxley who coined the termsee the SOED entry on Agnostic; however, other self-described Agnostics like Anthony Kenny hold the "weaker" position see Kenny op cit. PSYCHOLOGICAL ISSUES In his book "Minds and Gods: The Cognitive Foundations of Religion," Todd Tremlin argues that universal human cognitive process naturally produce gods. In particular, an agency detection device (ADD) and a theory-of-mind module (ToMM) lead us to expect an agent behind every event. We err on the side of attributing agency where there isn't any - a trait that no doubt served our ancestors well. We ask why we are here and whether life has purpose; we are anxious about being alone. Religious beliefs may recruit the cognitive mechanisms. William James emphasized the inner religious struggle between Melancholy and happiness, and pointed to Trance as a cognitive mechanism. Sigmund Freud stressed fear and pain, the need for a powerful parent to care for us, the obsessional nature of Ritual , and the hypnotic state a community can induce. SEE ALSO
FURTHER READING
NOTES 14. ^ See eg The Probability Of God by Stephen D. Unwin , its criticism in The God Delusion , the critical comment in that Article , and elsewhere . REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
|
|
|