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Therefore atheists might argue that since the entire universe, and all of creation can be explained by evolution and scientific cosmology, we don't need the existence of another entity called God. William of Occam would not have agreed; he was a Franciscan monk who never doubted the existence of God. But in his century he wasn't breaking the rule named after him. God was the only explanation available. There are a number of traditional arguments used to prove that God exists; however, none of them convinces atheists.
The universe is such a beautiful and orderly thing that it must have been designed. Only God could have designed it. Therefore since the universe exists, God must exist. An atheist might refute this by saying that, actually, the universe is not particularly beautiful and orderly.
Agnosticism is the view that the existence of God, of the divine or the supernatural is unknown As such, there would be no way to test said hypotheses, leaving the results inconclusive. . For if God does not exist it would of course be impossible to prove it; and if he does exist it would be folly to attempt it. For at the very. Here are six straightforward reasons to believe that God is really there. When it comes to the possibility of God's existence, the Bible says that there are people who his existence, ask yourself, If God does exist, would I want to know him? . He said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father but.
And even if it was, why should there be a designer? And modern science shows that most of the natural things we think of as designed are just the products of processes like evolution. We think of God as a perfect being. If God didn't exist he wouldn't be perfect. God is perfect, therefore God exists. Professional philosophers usually reject it on the grounds that existence is not a property of beings.
Everything that happens has a cause. Therefore the universe must have had a cause. That cause must have been God. Therefore since the universe exists, God must exist in order to have caused it to exist. An atheist might respond by asking what caused God. And what caused the cause of God, and so on. The argument might proceed that if God didn't need a cause, then maybe the universe didn't need a cause either.
If God was already perfect before he created the universe, why did he create it?
How did it benefit him? Why would he bother? And if the universe was caused, perhaps something other than God caused it?
The existence of evil seems inconsistent with the existence of a God who is wholly good, and can do anything. Most religions say that God is completely good, knows everything, and is all-powerful. But the world is full of wickedness and bad things keep happening. This can only happen if And so there is no being that is completely good, knows everything, and is all powerful. And so, there is no God. Theologians and philosophers have provided various answers to this argument. They all agree that it gives useful insights into the nature of God, evil, and belief.
For most of human history God was the best explanation for the existence and nature of the physical universe. But during the last few centuries, scientists have developed solutions that are much more logical, more consistent, and better supported by evidence.
Atheists say that these explain the world so much better than the existence of God. They also say that far from God being a good explanation for the world, it's God that now requires explaining. In olden times - and still today in some traditional societies - natural phenomena that people didn't understand, such as the weather, sunrise and sunset, and so on, were seen as the work of gods or spirits. Where we would see the weather as obeying meteorological principles, people in those days saw it as demonstrating God at work. And it was the same with all the other natural phenomena, they just showed God doing things.
The Greek philosopher Thales moved things on by suggesting that the gods were actually an essential part of things, rather than external puppeteers pulling strings to make the world work. But there was more to these ancient explanations than gods doing things in or to the world. People saw the whole universe in a religiously structured way; they had no other way to see it at that time. For the ancients, God provided the power that made the universe work, and God provided the structure within which the universe worked and human beings lived.
Ideas like that survive in modern astrology. Many people believe that their lives are in some way influenced by the movements of heavenly bodies. And the heavenly bodies concerned have names taken from mythology and religion. And you'll find similar ideas in most popular religious thinking.
If the only claim was that there was a man with the name of Jesus who lived in the middle east 2 thousand years ago, perhaps the gospels would suffice, because such a claim could easily be true and would carry little importance. I don't think not not. Or would you sit there and do nothing? In addition to helping us navigate the dangers of the world and find a mate, some scholars think that System 1 also enabled religions to evolve and perpetuate. So, the quarter million people who lost their lives in the tsunami some time back were all killed because they did not acknowledge your god? First, because of our natural curiosity to find out how the universe works a universe in which science has yet found no trace of nor need for any supernatural agency.
Many people still believe, or want to believe, in the idea of God as puppeteer. They believe that God is able to do things in the world: Nowadays it's a branch of astronomy and physics, but in pre-scientific times it was a religious subject, organising the universe in terms of almost military ranks of beings. God was at the top, and human beings came pretty much at the bottom.
In some cosmologies there was also an inverted hierarchy of evil beings going down from humanity to the source of wickedness, the devil, at the bottom. These religious cosmologies were rigid; each being had its place worked out for it in the structure that God had provided, and that was where it stayed. Looking at the universe like this provided great support for the hierarchical power structures of earthly nations and tribes: Everyone in a nation or tribe had their place, and the power came from the top. And if God had decided to organise the universe in such a hierarchy, this provided a strong argument against anyone who wanted to suggest that society could be organised in a fairer and more equal way - God had shown us the perfect way to organise things, and those who were ruling did so by a right given by God.
It was also very good news for whichever religion was followed in a particular nation: The idea that God steered everything in the universe as he saw fit was demolished by the discovery that there were natural laws obeyed by objects in the universe. Galileo, for example, discovered that the universe followed laws that could be written down mathematically. This suggested that there was logic and engineering throughout creation.
The universe behaved in a consistent manner and was not subject to gods pulling a string here and there, or some unexplained influences from astrological bodies. This didn't give Galileo any religious problems although it annoyed the church greatly and they eventually made him keep quiet about some of his conclusions because he believed that God had written the scientific rules.
And around this time scientists began to come up with new ways of assessing whether certain things were true. Things were expected to happen in a repeatable, testable way, that could be written down in equations.
Although scientific discovery began to explain more and more, it didn't cause large numbers of people to become less religious. Even many - probably most - scientists still had a place for God in the universe. At the very least, he had started the whole thing going, and he had created the rules that his universe was shown to obey. This half-way house between religion and science still had problems for the faithful, since it didn't seem to leave much room for God to intervene in the universe - and certainly it didn't need God to keep things ticking over.
But the half-way house also provided some support for the faithful.
They could look at the universe and see how beautifuly made it was, and be reassured that God had demonstrated his existence by creating such a wonderful place. And since science, until the late 18th, and 19th centuries, hadn't produced any good explanation of how things began, religion still had an important place in explaining how the world was the way it was. God's role as an explanation for the way things are took a serious knock from the sciences of geology and evolution.
Geologists discovered that the earth was hundreds of millions of years old, and not just 6, years old as was generally believed at that time. They showed that the rocks that make up the earth had been laid down in layers at different times; a deeper layer by and large came from an earlier time than a shallow layer. In each layer were fossils that showed that different species of animals had lived in different eras.
Not only were many no longer in existence but some didn't appear until relatively recent times. This was incompatible with the idea that God completely created the world in 6 days and so scientists with a faith came up with another compromise - the 6 days of biblical creation were a poetic way of describing long periods of millions of years during which God worked on the world.
The theory of evolution explains the variety of life forms on earth without any reference to God. It says that from very simple beginnings, processes of genetic variation and selection i. These processes are not directed by any being, they are just the way the world works; God is unnecessary. No intervening spirit watches lovingly over the affairs of nature though Newton's clock-winding god might have set up the machinery at the beginning of time and then let it run. No vital forces propel evolutionary change. And whatever we think of God, his existence is not manifest in the products of nature.
Some philosophers think that religious language doesn't mean anything at all, and therefore that there's no point in asking whether God exists. They would say that a sentence like "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" is neither true or false, it's meaningless; in the same way that "colourless green ideas sleep furiously" is meaningless.
Logical Positivists argued that a sentence was meaningless if it wasn't either true or false, and they said that a sentence would only be true or false if it could be tested by an experiment, or if it was true by definition. Since you couldn't verify the existence of God by any sort of "sense experience", and it wasn't true by definition eg in the way "a triangle has 3 sides" is true , the logical positivists argued that it was pointless asking the question since it could not be answered true or false.
These particular philosophers didn't only say that religious talk was meaningless, they thought that much of philosophical discussion, metaphysics for example, was meaningless too. This philosophical theory is no longer popular, and attention has returned to the issues of what "God" means and whether "God" exists. We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express - that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject is as being false.
Ayer actually preferred a weaker version of the theory, because since no empirical proof could be totally conclusive, almost every statement about the world would have to be regarded as meaningless. A proposition is said to be verifiable, in the strong sense of the term, if, and only if, its truth could be conclusively established in experience. But it is verifiable, in the weak sense, if it is possible for experience to render it probable.
For if the existence of such a god were probable, then the proposition that he existed would be an empirical hypothesis. And in that case it would be possible to deduce from it, and other empirical hypotheses, certain experiential propositions which were not deducible from those other hypotheses alone.
But in fact this is not possible For to say that "God Exists" is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false. They ask whether 'religion' is actually a name given to various psychological drives, rather than a response to the existence of God or gods. These beliefs are strongly held because they enable human beings to cope with some of their most basic fears. Current placeholder prime minister Theresa May has made a big deal about how her Christian upbringing makes her suitable for the role.
And despite the lawful separation of church and state, every official and wannabe US president has had to emphasise their religious inclinations. Even Trump , whose enthusiasm for maintaining the noble traditions of the presidency can be described as limited at best. Does that not seem … inconsistent? But variations of this comment have been made many times over the years.
Psychosis is defined as a loss of contact with reality, and can manifest in numerous ways. These delusions tend to be very resistant to argument, no matter how blatant the evidence to the contrary: But then, that begs the question, why do religious beliefs get a free pass? People are very resistant to those being challenged too. The brain essentially maintains a mental model of how the world is meant to work, and what things are meant to happen and when.
Beliefs, experiences, expectations, assumptions, calculations; all are combined into a constantly-updated general understanding of how things happen, so we know what to expect and how to react without having to figure everything out from scratch each time.