existence of god Flashcards
what is god ?
Omnipotent- can do anything. Has no limit to strength and ability. All powerful.
Omniscient - always there. Never-ending. Knows everything that happens. All-knowing.
Benevolent - will never do anything wrong. All loving.
Omnipresent - not limited by time and space, can be in all places at all times, all at once. All present.
Eternal - has always been. Was not created himself and created everything out of nothing.
Mysterious - very difficult to understand. Humans cannot understand god or what he does.
cosmological a - thomas aquinas
Saint Thomas Aquinas - St. Thomas Aquinas believed that the natural world provided a lot of evidence for God’s existence. In his work, he set out five ways of proving god’s existence from this evidence. The argument relies on cause and effect.
The first three of the five ways are; motion, cause, and contingency. The 1st way is motion. Things that move must be moved by something. In the world, there are things that are in motion, and whatever is in motion must have been moved by something else. This chain cannot go back to infinity; there must be a prime mover. The unmoved mover. The second way is cause. Aquinas argued that every effect has a cause. There must be a cause for the universe since something cannot come from nothing. When I need an uncaused cause. The third way is contingency. There must be a point in history where nothing existed. The necessary being that brought things into existence was god. He concluded that if god did not exist nothing would exist.
cosmological a - supporter
Leibniz was a German philosopher, who came up with the principle of sufficient reason. He thinks we require explanations and reasons for things existing. Agrees with Aquinas that we cannot have an infinite regress. Another supporter was J.L Mackie who was an Australian philosopher. He illustrated Aquinas’s rejection of infinite regress with a train: each carriage pulls one behind it, but wouldn’t get anywhere without an engine god is like an engine.
cosmological a - non supporter
David hume. He was a Scottish philosopher who challenged Aquinas’s views. The notion of necessary beings is incoherent - there is no being, the non-existence of which is inconceivable. The argument starts with the assumption that there is a god. Bertrand Russell also agreed with David hume.
teleological a - william paley
The teleological argument known as the design argument tries to prove god exists.
William Paley, an English philosopher. He presented his theory on the origins of life in natural theology. Analogy one was if you came across an object you would question who made it as it couldn’t have appeared randomly. There must be an intelligent designer who made it with purpose. Analogy two is that the world is very complex and has to be made by a word maker. This must be god.
teleological a - supporting a
Paley’s supporting arguments are that we do not need to see a watch being made or know a designer capable of making one, in order to know the watch had been designed. A watch sometimes going wrong, or hardly working right, does not disprove a designer. It still shows purpose and design throughout. If the watch had parts we had not yet discovered, or we could discover, in what ways they contribute to the watch.
big bang theory - info
The big bang theory offers a scientific explanation for the universe’s formation. The big bang theory proposes that 13.7 billion years ago, matter, time, energy, and space all began instantly as a super hot, super dense mixture of everything. this point is known as the singularity. the singularity exploded ( not an explosion as we know it). At this point, the explosive matter, time, and space hurtled outwards, cooling and expanding as it went. Three things came into being; matter, space, and time. The matter is when many elements which we know today such as hydrogen and helium all came into being as a result. Space began at the big bang. Space itself is expanding, not stuff expanding into space. Time is considered by physicists to have physical properties and so it too began.
big bang - red shift effect
The redshift effect. In the electromagnetic spectrum, there is a high-frequency light and a low-frequency light. If the object emitting this light is moving away or towards you, the light can be shifted into other colours.
big bang - doppler effect
The Doppler effect. If a star is emitting light but not moving, the light looks the same in all directions. But if a star is moving while emitting light, the light goes bluer if it’s moving towards you, or redder if it’s moving away. Blueshift; if an object is moving towards you, the wave is squished up and becomes high frequency. light appears to be blue. The redshift; if an object is moving away from you, the wave is stretched out - and becomes low frequency. The light appears to be redder.
big bang - cosmic microwave
Cosmic microwave background - with a fairly sensitive radio telescope, there is a faint background glow, almost exactly the same in all directions, that is not associated with any star, galaxy or other object. The big bang Theory says this is energy created at the beginning of the universe.
evil and suffering
A god who is omniscient will know evil and suffering exists. A god who is benevolent will want to get rid of evil. A god who is omnipotent will be able to get rid of evil. Evil does not exist in the world. Therefore, God does not exist.
