that can be "thought," it means that there are various perfections or qualities Thank you for signing up to receive email newsletters from Answers in Genesis. But notice: Given so many drunks, and given the steady ground beneath them, we can understand how their stumblings might cancel each other out, and how the group of them could remain (relatively) upright. If it is a license to believe in a single God who gave his son for our sins, why isn't it just as much a license to believe in Zeus and all the other Greek gods, or the three major gods of Hinduism, or the angel Moroni? The Argument from the Intelligibility of the World. 2. It expresses, rather than dispels, the confusion we feel when faced with the Fork of Free Will. 5. 1. (So, for example, we await some empirical means to test string theory, in order to find out whether we live in a world of eleven dimensions. (Remember, there are only three ways of answering any argument. Nonetheless, It isn't becoming in America's favorite atheist, who is, at this moment, Cass Seltzer, who is, somehow or other,just this here. 4. 4. Isn't it remarkable that no one, even the most consistent subjectivist, believes that it is ever good for anyone to deliberately and knowingly disobey his or her own conscience? In fact, lightning should be explained on its own level, as a material, natural, scientific phenomenon. The flaws that accompany each argument may be extremely damaging, even fatal, notwithstanding the fact that they have been taken seriously by many people throughout history. But the great monotheistic religions all declare that "mercy" is one of God's essential traits. Surely in most of us there is something of the skeptic. (If it were, all the problems about infinite duration would arise once again.) As for the thing that changes, although it can be what it will become, it is not yet what it will become. In other words, the universe began to exist. investigation; I have only your word for it. He is using Gods laws of logic, while denying the biblical God that makes such If not, how and when did the idea of God get into our minds? The first premise , as presented here, is a little less radical than James's pragmatic definition of truth in general, according to which a proposition is true if believing that it is true has a cumulative beneficial effect on the believer's life. Of course not -- not even in an infinite time. form a strong part of a cumulative case. The capacity for reverence and worship certainly seems to belong to us by nature. The right drug might The unique role that Judaism played in disseminating monotheism, mostly through the organs of its two far more popular monotheistic offshoots, Christianity and Islam, has bequeathed to its adherents an unusual amount of attention, mostly negative, from adherents of those other monotheistic religions. . A person's consciousness can survive after the death of his or her body (from 1). (Slavery and torture and genocide are not just distasteful to us, but are actually wrong. There are only four possibilities. It seems most reasonable that moral conscience is the voice of God within the soul, because moral value exists only on the level of persons, minds and wills. Obviously, it "just happened." In this splendid new book Father Robert Spitzer explores the implications of the latest discoveries in big bang cosmology, string theory, quantum physics, and the ontology of time to craft a series of convincing philosophical arguments. But is it likely? John Oakes. For the most part, fame is agreeable to Cass. This negates the intuition behind Premise 3, that the universe isintrinsicallyelegant and intelligible. It does not, on the face of it, seem cost effective. FLAW:Premise 5 is vulnerable to the same criticisms that were leveled against Premise 12 in the Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness. It is the Holy Spirit that brings conversion. A transcendent realm in which perfect justice prevails entails the Perfect Judge. For example, a man playing the piano is causing the music that we hear. The universe is a highly complex system. Look at yourselves -- drunken! In an atheistic, evolutionary universe where people are just animals, murder Read Pascal's version of it in the Pensees; what do you find there that is significant that is not included here? But still, he is the object of many. That can only happen, of course, given the existence of some supernatural being. [7] Argument #3: Evolution Shutterstock And that is not one more admirable quality Dostoyevsky said, "If God does not exist, everything is permissible." These epiphanies seem toannouncethemselvesto us, as if they came from an external guide: another example of the Projection Fallacy. The explanation for consciousness must lie beyond physical laws (from 6). But an infinite sequence of steps could never have reached this present point -- or any point before it. What view is compatible? "But if the spirit of religion join itself to the love of wonder, there is an end of common sense."). Survival after death entails the existence of an immaterial soul. We can know some of Gods thoughts because that exists, therefore, on this hypothesis, stands in need of being caused to The Bible teaches that atheists are not really atheists. We also know that there must exist whatever it takes for something to exist. And this world of our common experience is a world of pervasive order and intelligibility. Can you refute the modal and possible worlds versions of the ontological argument? ponens. Even if different people's consciences tell them to do or avoid totally different things, there remains one moral absolute for everyone: never disobey your own conscience. The Argument from Degrees of Perfection. All three versions argue that any explanation of the universe must account for the fact that we humans ( or any complex organism that could observe its condition) exist in it. And on and on it goes. The next morning, in the dewy grass in the shadow of the Cascades, I fell on my knees and accepted this truth that God is God, that Christ is his son and that I am giving my life to that belief.". Get answers to be the influence our kids need and give today. COMMENT:Free will is yet another quandary that takes us to the edge of our human capacity for understanding. We might figure out that someone's death was murder and no accident, 4. The more sophisticated you are, the more annotated your mental life, the more taken aback you're likely to feel, seeing what the world's lurch has brought to light, thrusting up beliefs and desires you had assumed belonged to an earlier stage of human development. The truth seems to be -- and if God exists, the truth is -- the other way around: our earthly fathers are pale projections of the Heavenly Father. Question 2: Is it really greater for something to exist in the mind and in reality than in the mind alone? It only has the potentiality for that state. Atheists deny (with their lips) the biblical It is no more than a statement, dressed in psychological jargon, that religious Obviously the collection of beings changing in space and time cannot be such a thing. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist. The odds that the prayer would have been followed by recovery out of sheer chance are extremely small (from 2). The paradox has not been clarified in the least by introducing God into the analysis. Give us time, and we will eventually discover it. God may be thought of as the inventor of morality, as he is the inventor of birds. 2. something which is supremely admirable. But that can only be true if all of created reality had a beginning. what chemicals do. But still, if that man in Texas seemed utterly genuine, and if his accusations hit home, made us think "He's right," then it would be very hard to consider what happened a deception or even an extraordinary coincidence. It is claiming, in other words, that moral values or obligations themselves -- and not merely the belief in moral values -- are objective facts. Natural selection cannot explain the complexity of the Original Replicator (from 3 & 6). Philosophers sometimes call this just- is-ness "contingency" and, if the fundamental laws of nature are contingent, then even if everything that happens in the world is explainable by those laws, the laws themselves couldn't be explained. For every desire will spring from the same ultimate source -- purposeless, pitiless matter. What do Anselm, Descartes, Spinoza. 4. For example, consider the atheist 3 . The atheist cannot account This utterly fails to account for why it is always wrong to disobey or change the rules. The ontological argument for the existence of God is one of the few arguments originating in logic rather than observation. FLAW:Premise 5 is a blatant example of the Fallacy of Using One Mystery To Pseudo-Explain Another. The argument from Philosophy Of Religion, Philosophy of Religion Analytical . Therefore, what it takes for the universe to exist cannot be identical with the universe itself or with a part of the universe. Most people were wrong about the movements of the sun and earth. Cass Seltzer has become the unlikely poster boy for this misunderstood group. ), 3. Question 1: Suppose I deny that God exists in the mind? A second form of denial of our premise is: "I am perfectly happy now." And the particular triggers for natural aesthetic experiences are readily explicable from the evolutionary pressures that have shaped the perceptual systems of human beings. Apparently self-moving things, like animal bodies, are moved by desire or will -- something other than mere molecules. nature cannot satisfy it. TimeMagazine, in a cover story on the so-called new atheists, had ended by dubbing him "the atheist with a soul." exists. That can never 1. 4. He says that the reality of God is the one that proves that these are clear and discrete ideas. to have any qualities at all. a dead organism can come back to life. FLAW 3:Mathematical reality if indeed it exists is, admittedly, mysterious. device. He was able to propose an explanation for this evidence that is compatible To some extent But if God does not exist, then these things have never once -- never once -- had a real object. well, there is such a thing as sex. dead. There is more suffering than we can explain by reference to the purposes that we can discern (from 7 & 8). The other is that there is a huge number of occurrences that could be counted as coincidences, if we don't specify them beforehand but just notice them after the fact. FLAW 1:can be crudely put: Who caused God? So the denial of premise 1 amounts to this: X exists; X can only exist if Y exists; and Y does not exist. FLAW 2:This argument treats all the other arguments as being on an equal footing, distributing equal probabilities to them all, and rewarding all of them, too, with the commendation of being taken seriously by history's greatest minds. all things, including all those things which are causing things to be, need Replicators make copies of themselves, which make copies of themselves, and so on, giving rise to an exponential number of descendants. COMMENT:Some would question the first premise, and regard its assertion as a flaw of this argument. gift which is given includes personal being: intelligence, will and spirit. Answers in Genesis is an apologetics ministry, dedicated to helping Christians defend their faith and proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. None of this is particularly good for the world, but it has been good for Cass Seltzer. Free shipping for many products! 1. But reason can at least let us know that "someone did it." But "what it takes for X to exist" means the immediate condition(s) for X's existence. When the proof says that God is the greatest being People have inner resources on which they draw, often without knowinghowthey are doing it or eventhatthey are doing it. See us on Fox News? Stated as a syllogism, it looks like this: The form of the syllogism is valid (modus tollens), and the premises are true. arguments begins with our versions of Aquinas's famous "five ways." 5. But these things are compatible in a way that materialism and belief in objective values are not. The concepts that human beings are valuable, are not simply Such proofs may seem futile in the contemporary context. Without Y, there can be no X. Until recently, Cass had felt almost apologetic explaining that his interest is in the whole wide range of religious experience a bloated category on anyone's account, but especially on Cass's, who sees religious frames of mind lurking everywhere, masking themselves in the most secular of settings, in politics and scholarship and art and even in personal relationships. And undoubtedly this statement of the argument influenced Lewis's later, more elaborate version. You can speak subjectivism but you cannot live it. Descartes argues that God is a perfect being who cannot be misled. quite abstract and difficult. Arguments for the Existence of God who profess to be atheists do ultimately believe in God in their heart-of-hearts. It really amounts to collective psychosis. 5. It didn't improve Galileo's life to believe that the earth moved around the sun rather than that the sun and the heavens revolve around the earth. Why? FLAW 1:The second premise suffers from the major flaw of the Argument from Cosmic Coincidences: a large number of experiences, together with the large number of patterns that we would call "coincidences" after the fact, make uncanny coincidences probable, not improbable. for existence -- cannot be met from within the imagined set. First, because they could be caused by something in nature, and second, because the context in which they occur is not religious. In effect, they appeal to God's activity as providing the bestor perhaps . And even if DNA did come from intelligence, why would you think that intelligence argument first derives a major premise from the real world of nature: that nature However, the atheist cannot account for laws of logic. Lying there awake on his lower bunk, Cass would think about being himself rather than being Jesse. This sort of demonstration has had a long and wide appeal among both Christians and Muslims. At times this has led to scientific ideas, such . 6. If there weren't things that we could not explain yet, then science would be complete, laboratories and observatories would unplug their computers and convert to condominiums, and all departments of science would be converted to departments in the History of Science. But It is, perhaps, the most controversial proof for the existence of God. Let us compare the diagonals. True enough, it is conceivable that this side of our nature is doomed to frustration; it is thinkable that those millions upon millions who claim to have found the Holy One who is worthy of reverence and worship were deluded. If in an infinite time that possibility was never realized, then it could not have been a real possibility at all. The consequences for the believer's life of believing should be considered as part of the evidence for the truth of the belief (just as the effectiveness of a scientific theory in its practical applications is considered evidence for the truth of the theory). The history of religious intolerance, including inquisitions, fatwas, and suicide bombers, suggests that the effects on one person's life of another person's believing in God can be pretty grim. What we humans know directly is this sensible changing world. If God exists there must exist something that takes for God to exist, if you say god is self-contingent, why not save a step and say the universe is self-contingent. constructing an organism does not mean there isnt one., Christian: DNA has information in itthe instructions to form a living In that case, we have no moral standard against which human desires can be judged. So there is not really a proof from miracles. The existence of the artificial desires does not necessarily mean that the desired objects exist. Prayers that a person can grow back a limb, or that a child can be resurrected from the dead, always go unanswered. 4. The same with morality. So right now, "It's as if these children come into the world knowing" are words that Cass had heard twenty years ago, inspired by a child who could see the numbers and thought that they were angels. So what this argument boils down to is the observation that we live in a lawful universe. (2) Not everything can depend on another for its existence. And in this they have a real point. FLAW:There are certain computational procedures governed by what logicians call recursive rules. For all of us, there can be nothing more significant than the lives we are living. His resurrection from the dead was, of course, the greatest of these, and is still taken by many today to be a solid foundation for their faith. is intellectually schizophrenicbelieving in God, but believing that he does The source communicates to those things the quality of heat they possess in greater or lesser measure. The Argument from The Improbable Self. 6. 12. The idea of God can easily arise like this: we notice degrees of perfection among finite beings -- some are more perfect (or less imperfect) than others. Not that we would have to believe in God after witnessing this event. Therewas Jesse, andherewas Cass. How much more so here, where what we experience is a relationship involving reverence and worship and, sometimes, love. Therefore there is a source of being Others (the argument from
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