The philosophical arguments:
1. Cosmological Argument (Psalm 19:1-6)
Naturalistic argument in which the existence of God is deduced or inferred as highly probable from facts concerning causation, change, or motion. (Plato and then Aristotle were associated with this argument) William Lane Craig is a contemporary defender of this argument. city, house, etc. cause: builder, human and effect universe-earth - cause: creator, God and effect
(This doesn’t argue for omnipotent power but it does argue for a very powerful force)
2. Teleological Argument (Job 38,39:13-19)
Purpose and Intelligent Design (Socrates was first associated with this argument)
Birds get heavier feathers in winter-cows generate heat below 19 degrees.
Man can make tools, but
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Anthropological Argument (Acts 17:28-29)
All human beings are children of God in the creation sense. Intelligence, conscience, belief, moral nature.
We all have many things in common, we all sin, have fear. This points to a common originator. There is a twisted reflection of God because of the fall, but still we reflect God. “Made in God’s image”. We are all the offspring of God
We think - God thinks, we have Emotion-God has emotion, we can discern right and Wrong-God can.
4. Ontological Argument (Anselm of Canterbury proposed this argument and later Rene Descartes deployed a similar argument)
Idea of God - Everyone has an idea of God. Even atheists believe in a god in some sense. If you can conceive a God, then logic says there must be a God, or else where did the idea come from?
5. General Revelation (Romans 1:18-20)
Knowledge of God and spiritual matters discovered through nature, philosophy, and reasoning.
Heck, just go to the grocery store and look around at the vegetables and fruit and marvel at how God has created all this stuff perfectly for us to eat.
In a 1996 survey of American scientists, 40% say they believe in a personal God who answers prayer. (Star Tribune, April 3, 1997). I point this out because I hear sometimes that almost all scientists are atheists which is not
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The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. Perspective on the News; June,
In “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”, Jonathan Edwards persuades his audience by using rhetorical strategies and quotes from the Bible to validate the point he is attempting to convey (Belasco and Johnson 347). Edwards wants the readers to be persuaded with repetition of the different phrasings of “wicked Israelites” and to be impressed by the sophisticated tone within the passage (Belasco and Johnson 347). Edwards is also attempting to persuade and impress through his use of hasty generalization such as, “As he that walks in slippery places is every moment liable to fall; he can’t foresee one moment whether he shall stand or fall the next; and when he does fall, he falls at once, without warning.” (Belasco and Johnson 347). Pathos is
I think William Lane Craig made a strong argument when it came to a cosmological argument. He does have a point that there is an explanation of how the world came to be but there is more to it, such as dates and things like that. He says that the ultimate question in philosophy would be “why does anything exists”? He brings up that atheist think that the universe is eternal but he says there is reasons why the universe began. He says its obscured to think that its number of past events is infinite, which he says leads to self-contradictions.
This work is appropriate to use in this essay because it shows that the belief in God, and even science, is mainly due to faith. Without faith, both science and God would not exist. Bloom, Paul. “Is God an Accident?” Fields of Reading: Motives for Writing.
The so called Transcendental argument which is an argument which states that x is a necessary condition for y to be present so based on this philosophy, there is a God and if there was not a God, we would not be here and if there was not a God we couldn’t figure out anything at all. Why because there is nothing greater than God himself. Anything created had to come from someone or something greater than the person him or herself that was created by, a designer. Example like a child building something from Legos.
There have been an innumerable amount of arguments for the existence of God for hundreds of years. Some have become much more popular due to their merit, and their ability to stay relevant through changing times. Two arguments in particular that have been discussed for a very long time are the ontological and cosmological arguments. Each were proposed in the period of the high middle ages by members of the Roman Catholic Church. They each have been used extensively by many since their introduction.
The ontological argument states that perfection is a part of the concept of God, and that perfection entails existence, and so the concept of God entails God’s existence. However, it can be argued that if God is an infinite goodness, then its contrary, evil, should not exist. Alas, there is evil in the world, and, therefore, God cannot exist. The ontological argument also seeks to demonstrate that God exists on the basis of concept alone. Pascal’s Wager attempts to justify the belief in God with an
The traditional claim of all Cosmological Arguments is defined as “something outside the universe is responsible to explain the existence of the universe” (PowerPoint 380). In the “causal argument,” or the First Cause Argument on the cosmological argument, “something” outside of the universe that is supposed to inform us about the existence of the universe is argued to be explained as God. As the first cause argument goes into depth and with the help of Thomas Aquinas, it is easy to see how God is responsible for explaining the existence of the universe around us. Within the first cause argument on the cosmological argument the following premises and conclusions are discussed: Premise 1: There exists things that are caused. Meaning that
Anselm’s argument is based on this known definition of the concept of God alone. Descartes’ argument for the existence of God is based on his foundation of knowledge, logic. Humans have the idea in their minds of infinite perfection. Humans also have the idea of themselves as inferior to this idea as imperfect. For humans to have the idea of infinite perfection, there must be truth in the reason for them having this idea.
Descartes declares he has to determine if there is a God and if he does exist, whether he can be a deceiver. The reason he has to determine the existence of God and what he is, rests in his theories of ideas. This is because we do not know if there is an outside world and we can almost imagine everything, so all depends on God’s existence and if he is a deceiver. “To prove that this non-deceiving God exists, Descartes finds in his mind a few principles he regards as necessary truths which are evident by the “natural light” which is the power or cognitive faculty for clear and distinct perception.” If arguments is presented in logical trains of thought, people could not help but to be swayed and to understand those arguments.
So the first cause argument proves that God does not exist assuming the first cause argument is sound then there must be some other cause because it is not God. In summary the notion of omnipotent is a miss-name because it implies the potency, power, causality when in fact all that it does is imply logical entailment, it implies that if it wills something you can deduce from the statement that something exists, you do not need a causal step, it is a logical deduction and therefore the first cause argument argues from causes in the world
Anselm famously associated with the “ontological argument” for the existence of God. Anselm, in Proslogion, coined the term “ontological” to describe a branch of philosophy that deals with the notion of “being or existence.” (McGrath & OverDrive, Inc. 2001 p. 181). Proslogion is a work of meditation, not of logical argument.
In this argument we already assumed that there may be possibility that God exist and finally we reached where we started. So this argument does not give us the exact information about existence of God. There are many objections on this argument but still it is a powerful argument. In my opinion, this argument is not much satisfactory. It describes that existence is greater than imagination.
St. Anselm’s Ontological Argument Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury, first proposed the ontological argument about the existence of God. The Archbishop relies on ontology to prove that God indeed does exist. In this way, the archbishop was able to show God’s existence using His definition. Although the ontology was used for such purposes before Anselm, it is thought that he put it in the most comprehensive manner. The basis of the argument is the use of logic, which means that to prove that God exists one needs not apply experience.
St. Anselm and Descartes are known for presenting the first ontological arguments on the existence of God. The word ontological is a compound word derived from ‘ont’ which means exists or being and ‘–ology’ which means the study of. Even though Anselm and Descartes’ arguments differ slightly, they both stem from the same reasoning. Unlike the other two arguments on God’s existence (teleological and cosmological), the ontological argument does not seek to use any empirical evidence but rather concentrates on pure reason. The rationale behind this school of thought
I will start my points in this argument by, first, opposing the evidences and reasons why we should believe that God exists and second, by pointing one of many reasons why we should believe that God does not exist. In opposing