CH1.3 Arguments based on observation

Question 1

what does teleological mean?

Answer 1

it means looking to the end results in order to draw a conclusion about what is right or wrong

Question 2

what does cosmological mean?

Answer 2

it is to do with the universe

Question 3

what is natural theology?

Answer 3

it is drawing conclusions about the nature and activity of God by using reason and observing the world

Question 4

what does contingent mean?

Answer 4

it means depending on other things

Question 5

what is the principle of sufficient reason?

Answer 5

the principle that everything must have a reason to explain it

Question 6

what are a posteriori arguments?

Answer 6

arguments which draw conclusions based on observation through experience

Question 7

what is meant by necessary existence?

Answer 7

existence which does not depend on anything else

Question 8

what are a priori arguments?

Answer 8

arguments which draw conclusions through the use of reason

Question 9

what do some people who think the existence of God is not a matter of philosophy think it is a matter of instead?

Answer 9

they think its a matter of faith instead

Question 10

are the cosmological argument and teleological argument a priori or a posteriori arguments?

Answer 10

they are a posteriori

Question 11

how does the teleological argument attempt to demonstrate the existence of God?

Answer 11

it tries to do so from the evidence of order and purpose in the world around us. They reason that we could not have complex, purposeful features in the world unless there was a divine intelligence who designed those features

Question 12

how does the cosmological argument try to demonstrate the existence of God?

Answer 12

by asking the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ The existence of the universe, it is claimed, requires an explanation, and the best explanation is the existence of god

Question 13

what is revealed theology?

Answer 13

it is a reflection on the content of what is believed to have been shown to humanity by God

Question 14

what are teleological arguments often known as?

Answer 14

they are often known as ‘design arguments’

Question 15

in Aquinas’ way, what are the 2 ways in which knowledge of god could be reached?

Answer 15

-one is through revelation, where god chooses to reveal the truth to people, e.g. through the words of the Bible
-the other is through our own human reason (which Aquinas thought was given to us by God for this very purpose). Aquinas thought that if we applied reason to the evidence that we see around us, we can reach valuable truths.
-he believed that faith and reason could be combined in order to reach a better understanding of God

Question 16

what is Aquinas’ design argument?

Answer 16

-in his book, Summa Theologica, he wrote ‘Five Ways’ of showing that God exists. The last of these 5 is the one that makes up his version of the design argument.
-in the Fifth Way, Aquinas said that nature seems to have an order and a purpose to it. We know, he suggested, that nothing inanimate is purposeful without the aid of a ‘guiding hand’ (he uses the example of an archer shooting an arrow at a target). What he means here is that no non-living thing can have its own purpose; the river cannot decide to flow out to the sea because a river has no mind, and yet it does. The sun cannot decide to rise in the morning and to make each day the right length, and yet it does.
-therefore, everything in nature which is moving but which has no intelligence must be directed to its goal by God

Question 17

what analogy did William Paley use to illustrate his design argument?

Answer 17

-he used the analogy of someone coming across a watch on a heath.
-imagine, he said, if someone was out walking on a heath, and looked down and saw a watch lying on the ground. The person finding the watch would notice how well the watch worked in order to tell the time, and would conclude that someone must have made the watch, rather than the watch just happened to be there by chance, or by the random orderings of atoms.
-Paley said that looking at the watch was similar to looking at the world, or at the human body, and noticing how it all works together - so intricately that one can only infer that there must have been a divine intelligence ordering it.

Question 18

What did Paley say looking at a watch was similar to?

Answer 18

he said that it was similar to looking at the world, or at the human body, and noticing how it all works together - so intricately that one can only infer that there must have been a divine intelligence ordering it. He argued that we do not have to have ever seen a watch being made in order to realise that there must have been a maker; the watch does not have to work perfectly for us to realise that it must have been designed. He went on to say that the world itself was even more impressive than a watch in its workings: ‘… the contrivances of nature surpass the contrivances of art, in the complexity, subtility, and curiosity of the mechanism’

Question 19

in his book, Natural Theology, what does Paley discuss many different examples of?

Answer 19

of the suitability of the bodily structure of animals to the conditions of their life. He argued that only is everything clearly designed, but it is designed for a purpose; and it is designed to an infinite degree of care. Even on the smallest scale there is evidence of craft and skill, and despite the number of different kinds of things in the world, the same care seems to have been taken with the design of each. Paley concluded that this was not only evidence of intelligent design, but of gods care.

Question 20

from what type of theology do the cosmological arguments come from?

Answer 20

from natural theology. They use the world around us to draw conclusions about the existence and nature of God

Question 21

what does the cosmological argument use as its starting point?

Answer 21

it uses the whole cosmos, or universe, and looks for a reason why the universe should exist

Question 22

what is the basis for the cosmological argument?

Answer 22

the basis for the cosmological argument is that the universe cannot account for its own existence. Why do things exist at all - why is there something, rather than nothing? There must be a reason, the argument says, for the existence of the universe, and this reason has to be something which is not part of the physical world of time and space, because the physical world is incapable of being the reason for its own existence

Question 23

who are the philosophers from which two of the best cosmological arguments came from?

Answer 23

Aquinas and Leibniz. Both drew from the ancient Greeks as inspiration for their explanations of how the existence of the universe provides evidence for the existence of God

Question 24

What 2 assumptions did Aquinas base his cosmological argument on?

Answer 24

that the universe exists, and that there must be a reason why. All but the most sceptical would agree with (a); however, not all would agree with (b). Some people such as Bertrand Russel and Richard Dawkins, are happy to accept that the universe just is, without moving to the conclusion that there should be some reason for it. Aquinas, however, took as a starting point the view that there must be some explanation of why anything exists at all.

Question 25

of Aquinas’ Five Ways, the first three are different variants of what argument?

Answer 25

of the cosmological argument

Question 26

on Aquinas’ First Way of establishing Gods existence, Aquinas concentrated on what?

Answer 26

on the existence of change, or motion, in the world. He considered the ways in which objects move, or grow or change in state. His argument, closely following that of Aristotle, was that everything which is in motion, or changing, has to be put into motion, or changed by something else. As things are, to our observation, changing and moving, then they must have been set in motion by something; Aquinas thought that this sequence of one thing moving another could not be infinite, but that there must have been an Unmoved Mover to set the whole thing off.

Question 27

What is the argument Aquinas sets out in the Second Way?

Answer 27

the argument is very similar to the one of the First Way, except that it replaces the idea of change and motion with the concepts of cause. Every ‘effect’ has a cause, Aquinas argued. Infinite regress (going back and back in time forever) is impossible, therefore, there must be a First Cause ‘which we call God’. Here, Aquinas concentrates on the idea of ‘efficient cause’, borrowing terminology from Aristotle. Aquinas took up Aristotle’s understanding of causes, to argue that things do not cause themselves in this way - they cannot be their own agents. Therefore, he said, there must be a first efficient cause, and this would be God

Question 28

What did Aquinas argue for his Third Way?

Answer 28

in his Third Way, Aquinas argued that the world consists of contingent beings, which are beings that begin and end, and which are dependent on something else for their existence. Everything in the physical world is contingent, depending on external factors for its existence.

Question 29

what are the 2 ways in which things are contingent?

Answer 29

one, they depend on something having brought them into existence in the first place, and two, they also depend on outside factors for the continuation of their existence

Question 30

according to Aquinas, if we agree that everything in the universe is contingent, then we see that what?

Answer 30

then we see that nothing would be here at all. Contingent things need something else to bring them into existence, so nothing would have ever started - there would still be nothing - unless there is some other being, capable of bringing other things into existence but being independent of everything else, or ‘necessary’. It would have to be a being that is not caused, and that depends on nothing else to continue to exist - and this, Aquinas thought, would be God

Question 31

what question did Leibniz raise?

Answer 31

the question: ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ In order to address his question, Leibniz offered a form of the cosmological argument, which he based on his ‘Principle of Sufficient Reason.’ This principle, which is not universally accepted, states that everything which exists must have a reason or a cause for its existence

Question 32

How many years before Paley gave his famous analogy of the watch did Hume write his criticisms of the design argument?

Answer 32

23 years before

Question 33

what criticism did Huma have against the watch analogy?

Answer 33

-he said that the analogy between a watch and the world is weak. He said that it cannot be assumed that it is obvious to everyone how the world is like a watch, regularly formed and fit for a purpose. Characteristics of purpose and design might be obvious in a watch, but they are not nearly so obvious in the world. We only make watches because the world is not like a watch; we would only stop and pick up the watch on the heath because it is so unlike the objects which occur in nature. We would conclude that the watch had been designed because we would think it could not have come about naturally, as such design is not seen in nature.
-It is not right, Hume thought, to draw these comparisons between the world and machines and use them as analogies when there is really very little similarity

Question 34

what did Hume argue about the appeal to order in the world for the design argument?

Answer 34

-Hume argues that order in the world does not necessarily mean that someone must have had the idea of the design.
-even if we do see order in the world, that does not enable us to leap to the idea of a Divine Orderer. We do not know, for a fact, that all order comes about because of an intelligent idea. The most we can say is yes, there appears to be some order in the world.
-the recognition of order, too, has its limitations, because we do not have other worlds to compare with this one, to see if this one is more ordered than another. We have no other standard by which to judge it. Perhaps there are other worlds, a great deal more ordered than this one, which if we knew about them, would lead us to the conclusion that there is very little order in our own.

Question 35

what did Hume believe about order?

Answer 35

-Hume believed that order is a necessary part of the worlds existence
-if everything we random and nothing suited its purpose, the world would not be here anymore. Any world, he thought, will look designed, because if it were chaotic, it would not survive. It is not enough to show that the world is orderly for the conclusion to be drawn that God must have designed it.
- we also have to be able to prove that this order could not have come about except by God, and this is impossible to show. This self-sustaining order, it is argued, could have come about by chance. Darwin’s findings support this. The creatures we have around us are suited to their purpose only by chance, because the ones which were not suited did not survive

Question 36

what was another assumption of the design argument which Hume criticised?

Answer 36

he also criticised design arguments because of their assumption that if we look at the effects (the world), we can infer the cause (God). Aquinas had claimed that this was possible - that, in looking at the evidence around us, we can work backwards and see that God must be the cause of it. But Hume attacked this reasoning, saying that cause and effect does not operate as simply as this
-he said that even if we can assume a creator (and he was not sure that we could), there is no reason to suggest that this creator is the Christian God. We have a finite and imperfect world; there is no need to assume that there must be an infinite, perfect God behind it

Question 37

what did Hume argue the universe is?

Answer 37

he argued that the universe is unique, so we are unable to say what it is like, what it could have been like, or how it must have come into being, because we cannot have experience of any other way that things might have been. We do not know how worlds are usually made, or what degree of order to expect, and so on; and with no other experience, we cannot draw any firm conclusions

Question 38

how did Hume criticise the cosmological arguments?

Answer 38

he criticised them by saying that we could not logically move from the idea that everything in the universe has a reason, to say that the universe as a whole must have a reason
-Bertrand Russel made a similar point in the 20th century, by saying that just because every human has a mother, this does not mean that the human species as a whole has a mother. It is overstepping the rules of logic to move from individual causes of individual things, to the view that the totality has a cause.

Question 39

what is one reason why a posteriori arguments can be said to be persuasive? However, why does this not always work?

Answer 39

because they start from observation of the world. They draw our attention to something we can see for ourselves: the apparent order in the natural world, e.g. or the existence of the universe. The argument then proceeds from a starting point which we are often willing to accept, because we have used our own senses and perceived the things the argument describes, so we might start off in agreement with the premise of the argument
-however, this does not always work. Teleological arguments, for example, start from the observation that the natural world seems orderly and purposive; we are led from this observation to the suggestion that a divine intelligent designer might be the best explanation for the order we observe. However, this argument is only going to start persuading us if we agree with the observation being made. We might think that the natural world seems chaotic and purposeless, in which case the argument is going to do little persuading

Question 40

what does the persuasiveness of an a posteriori argument depend on?

Answer 40

depends on the quality of the explanation, and also on whether it is the best explanation of the observable facts or whether there are other explanations available which might be better