5.4 PHILOSOPHY
lanny.wilson
TheodicyGroupProject.pptx
Theodicy Project: The Existence of God
By:
Mario Velasquez
Lanny Wilson
Krystine Waits
Is God Real? Cause and Effect
A best-known argument defending that God is in fact real is the cosmological argument.
“Something good can not come from nothing,” meaning something must have caused this world to exist.
Thomas Aquinas believed that anything that moved was moved by something else. His argument was that there must be a greater power in charge in order to make things that are in motion, stay in motion.
There are so many things that cause other things to happen, and there must be a Creator who is all-knowing and in charge of what will lead to the next thing.
Miracles and Experiences
Miracles are things that happen that can not seem to be explained.
They tend to be things that seem too good to be true, or something that is so mind-blowing that it could happen.
Some say that it is impossible to say miracles happen because of God and say it could just be coincidence.
Personal experiences that people think were God is another argument for His existence.
Religious experiences whether they are good or bad play a big role in our faith.
“Clearly miracles and religious experiences play a very important role for Christians. The Gospel tells us that Jesus was someone who did signs and wonders.” (Schenck 2014)
David Hume
David Hume is a famous skeptic who argued that no amount of eyewitness testimony could justify belief in a miracle.
This basically means that it is so hard to understand a miracle happening unless you experience it yourself.
He also said that we would have to assume all religions are true based on everyone’s personal experiences and miracles they have gone through.
Order and Design
The teleological argument suggests that there must be an intelligent “designer” to explain the complexity in creation.
Chaos theory says that it is random complexity that tends to develop of a virtual mathematical certainty.
Moral argument is an argument that states fundamental human sense of rights and wrongs that can’t be explained without a moral Creator.
All of these theories tie together to explain how exactly order and design is brought into Christianity and the existense of God.
Immanuel Kant
Kant was one of the first to make this kind of argument that a moral law was part of the rational fabric of the universe. (Schenck 2014)
Kant also believed that we make mental connections between acting morals and the greatest possible happiness.
He argued that God must exist beyond this world because He had made that connection and would reward others for doing so in the next life.
Arguments that God exists
Necessity argument by definition is that if all entities had only a possible existence, then conceivably nothing might exist. Since something does, there must be at least one necessary thing.
Meanwhile, the ontological argument says that if we can conceive of the greatest possible Being, it must exist. If God were so far-fetched, there would be no way our minds could even come up with the idea that He is real.
