Philosophy

Also, there is a fair bit of epistemology to this question as well: What is the evidence S has for believing that God exists (or holds another similarly distinct religious belief)?

1. Philosophizing about Religion

A. Philosophy vs. Theology Philosophy asks critical metaphysical questions about religion.

- both believers and non-believers can ask philosophical questions about religion

Given what we know about the world is it likely that God exists?

Theology is the non-critical interpretation of a religion and its central divine texts.

Philosophy uses reason Theology uses faith as its virtue

B. Philosophy’s Distinctness

- Sociology of religion studies the micro-macro level of in and out-group relationships within religion.

- Psychology of religion studies the psychological personality and dimensions about what CAUSES religious belief.

Ex. What causes someone to hold the belief that God exists?

C. Philosophy asks instead: Do we have good reasons (those founded in good arguments) to conclude that God exists

- philosophy uses logic and epistemology and wonders about the role of good evidence

2. “God” the Word and God the Entity

A. Terminology of the Debate - Theists- people who think God exists

Atheists- people who think that God does not exist

Agnostics – people who think that neither the atheist or theist position can be proven.

The word “God” is certainly ambiguous. There are many conceptions of God/Divine and many people use this word differently to refer to different things: Ex. Hindus believe that God is the all encompassing Being of reality (Brahmin) and that the Divine aspect in our consciousness is asleep (Atman); we have forgotten that we are also God.

Ex. God is not a personal Being in Daoism, but an all encompassing interplay of harmonious opposites in nature (Yin and Yang) and within us.

Ex. There is no God, but a Divine Reality (Nirvana) achievable through systematic meditative practice in Buddhism and some have deified the originally Buddha despite his pronouncements that he is not a God.

Ex. Christianity claims that God is whole with three various manifest aspects: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Ex. Both Islam and Judaism claim God is one, not divisible in any way.

Despite the many ideas in human culture, Double intends the term to mean what it has come to mean in Christian theological (that is Catholic theological) approaches to the divine.

I define “God” as “A being that is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipotent, morally perfect, the creator of all things, who has psychological states such as concern for His creations, but is not a human being—because God is nonphysical, that its, exists outside the natural world of space and time (Double, 236).

Why the problem? Well, the Bible is not too clear about what properties God has. The abstraction of God as a concept is not derived from particular religious doctrines. Indeed, a fundamentalist approach to a literal reading of religious text would not furnish any more precision on the idea of God.

3. Ways to Argue for the Existence of God

If God is nonphysical, then appeals to direct observation do not work.

The nonphysical may cause certain effects in the physical world.

Three Types of Arguments for God’s Existence:

1. Expresses the hope that God exists as a reason for believing that God exists

2. This argument postulates that the existence of God is the best explanation for observed facts about the world.

1 and 2 Double calls: quasi-scientific hypotheses. Hey are like science since they existence of an unobserved entity can be used to explain things that go on in the natural world all the time. Long ago, science postulated the existence of positive and negative charges to explain the movement of electricity in a circuit.

3. Thirdly, an argument for God’s existence can be based on pure logic, that is, the type of argument that appeals to concepts alone, but never direct observation.

- Most philosophy of religion occurs here with concepts, but does not require direct observation.

Faith-Based Arguments for the Existence of God

5. Wishful Thinking Arguments are not true because we wish them to be true, we must analyze them.

Faith is believing in God without evidence, and if we were theologians, then this would be fine. However, we are not theologians. We’re students of philosophy. We’re looking for the best argument to the question: Does God exist?

Think of this By Analogy: Q: What evidence do you have that the Phillies will win the World Series? A: None, I have faith.

By its very definition, faith does not provide evidence. Instead, faith is belief without evidential support for why you think something is true. 6. Textual Proof

Some theists claim that gods/God exists because their preferred religious texts describe their conception of the Divine.

Argument for Textual Proof has three variations

1. Theists may believe that God exists simply because the text says so—pure faith interpretation.

2. Theists may take the religious text to be a history book that recounts the occurrences of a supernatural being.

3. Theists may take the religious text as providing evidence for the existence of God by presenting information that can be explained only by assuming that God exists.

Logical objections

Against 1a: 1. The Bible is a representational device

2. Representational devices on their own cannot furnish the truth of what they claim to represent as true. 3. Therefore, the Bible cannot furnish the the truth of what it claims to represent as true.

Against 1b.

Given that we cannot tell which representational device is true on its own merits, we would have to accept all the sacred texts, and this would lead to contradictions. We would have to accept polytheism in one culture with monotheism in an Abrahamic religion.

7. Pascal’s Wager

This is a cost-benefit analysis argument:

Theistic choice has better pay off than the nontheistic option.

Agnostic and the atheist do not gain as much.

Religious believers might object that this is a what’s-in-it-for-me-ness, and this is not the best religious attitude to have of God.

Does Pascal ignore the considerable negative value associated with theism and Christianity? What might those negative values be?

Pascal measures consequences in terms of our happiness, but discounts the value we may place on being good knowers of the world. Pascal has adopted the reward policy before settling the question of God’s existence. This is just an argument to accept the fact that God exists. It offers no existence of God at all. 8. James Will to Believe Argument

Pragmatism: an idea/theory is true if and only if fulfills our needs and purposes in human life.

So, a claim is true if and only if it fulfills our needs and purposes.

Double’s Reconstruction:

(1) Whenever we have a choice of whether to believe X and (a) the truth of X can be neither proved nor disproved, (b) the choice is momentous to us, and (c) the choice is forced (to delay making a choices is to lose out on the benefits of making that choice), then it is rational to decide to believe in x.

(2) Belief in God, at least for some persons, satisfies (a), (b), and (c).

(3) Therefore, at least for some persons, it is rational to decide to believe in God.

Objection 1: Is James’s reasoning “sufficiently reverent”? I do not think Double is right on both those objections. The point of Pascal and James’s argument is to admit also that the traditional theoretical proofs are impossible to prove. Arguments like the design argument, or the first cause argument do not cut ice as much as we think they do. Hence, we need to look out how these ideas function.

Objection 2: James divides people up uncharitably. I do not think Double is right here either. James’s larger commitment is that philosophical ideas are held by people of a certain personality type. Certain personalities are attracted to belief in God as much as there are people that do not find any satisfaction by this idea.

Belief is not just a proposition that is true or false because the proposition represents the world Instead, beliefs are “rules of action.” Every belief we hold is true for what it does for us interacting with the world.

9. Moral Arguments (1) There exists an objective difference between right and wrong actions

(2) Only God could create the objective difference between right and wrong

(3) Therefore, God exists

1. Depends on something called moral objectivism, that there are universal moral facts that apply to all people at all times.

2. Premise 2 involves the idea that there is no other explanation for creating objective morality. Possible grounds for morality: (1) Best consequences

(2) Human nature

(3) Human reason

Argument from Precondition of Morality

(1) Only belief in God-who is assumed to reward moral behavior in an afterflie- will motivate human beings to live morally.

(2) Therfore, we need to postulate the existence of God as a precondition of moral life.

Does morality make sense if God cannot motivate people to be good? Put another way, does morality have any bite without God?

Presence of religion has equally negative effects: Inquisition, Holy wars, burning of women as witches etc.

Should we posit God exists on moral grounds given that we don’t have sufficient epistemological grounds?

What Double observes about God for Kant is the same for James. Kant says that we cannot use speculation to access reality as it is in-itself. We can only reason about the possible preconditions for possible experience. 11. Religious Experience

“Religious experience” is ambiguous

Two senses of ambiguity 1. Direct experience of a religious entity

2. an experience that someone takes to be a religious entity. (this one requires inference to the best explanation)

(1) Person P has religious experience R.

(2) By definition, anyone who has a religious experience has a direct experience of God

(3) Therefore person P has a direct experience of God

The sense of ambiguity 1 in this argument could call into question if a person truly has ever had a direct experience of God. If we use sense 2 “an experience that someone takes to be a religious entity”, then we have to use inference-to-the-best-explanation. Consider the following change to the experience argument

A. Data Person P has a religious experience R (P takes R to be of God)

B. Best Explanation: Person P has a direct experience of the existence of God.

Mystical position: If you have to ask, then you’ll never know.

· can’t stand up to scrutiny.

Sally has R. Should we infer from the internal quality of her experience that she has had an experience of God?

Non-mystics think that the mystics actively avoid the burden of proof whereas the mystical insistent that we just follow the principle: If a person has experienced X, then other persons should believe X unless there is good reason to reject the claim.

This puts the burden of proof on the critic of religious experience. Clever strategy. Problem? What about other explanations? Can psychology or neuroscience give suitable explanations for why religious experience occurs?

12. First Cause Argument

Aquinas’s Five Ways: here we will study the first cause argument and the Contingency argument

(1) There are events that occur now in the natural world

(2) Every event in the natural world requires a cause other than itself

(3) Therefore, there must be a series of causes tracing backward into the past (from 1 and 2)

(4) It is impossible for a series of causes to go backward in time infinitely.

(5) Therefore, there must have been a first cause of the events occurring now

(6) The first cause is God

This argument is committed to determinism as a presupposition: Every event in the natural world has a cause.

(4) can be doubted since it may violate the Law of Conservation of Energy/Mass, that is, neither energy and mass be created nor destroyed, but only changed in form.

- Response, theist can hold that Law of Conservation can be mostly true about nature, but not all of nature.

Criticism that how do we know there is one first cause… why not many? The move from premise 5 and 6: How do we know that the first-cause is God as we understand him?

Can a revised argument prove better: Revised argument changes two things: 1. Sees God as an explainer rather as a cause who interacts with nature.

2. emphasizes the principle of sufficient reason, which maintains for every fact, there is a true explanation for why it is a fact.

(1) Assume there is a series of physical causes and effects is infinite into the past, as the critics of the first cause argument assert

(2) There would be no event in time

(3) There is no time that God set the cosmos into motion

(4) God did not create the matter of the cosmos

(5) Nonetheless, God is the explanation of why events are happening in the cosmos, why things are in motion, and why matter exists.

Once we stop seeing God as the first cause, and posit him as an explanation, it would seem that our theoretical motivation for maintaining God as an explanation loses steam.

13. The Contingency Argument (Sometimes called The Cosmological Argument)

(1) Assume that atheism is true, that is, that the physical universe consisting of contingent things is the only thing that exists

(2) Assume that time goes back infinitely into the past

(3) Assume that there is a large, but finite, number of contingent things in existence

(4) Assume that over infinite time, every mathematically possible event will occur (Whatever is mathematically possible is physically possible, and what is physically possible will eventually occur)

(5) Then, at some time in the past all contingent things in the universe would have cased to exist (The Cosmic Catastrophe would have occurred)

(6) Then, nothing would exist now.

(7) But something does exist now.

(8) Therefore, atheism is false. The physical universe consisting of contingent things is not the only thing that exists. A necessary being (God) exists.