Final Exam: Philosophy of Religion Flashcards
What are the four attributes of Aquinias God?
Is there a problem with those?
- Omnipotent (all-powerful)
- Omniscient (all-knowing)
- Omnibenevolent (all-good)
- Personal
Logical problem: omnipotency
can God make a stone so heavy that he cannot lift it? (double-bind) if yes and if no, his power is limited
What are Aquinas 5 arguments for God’s existence?
- Motion
- Causation
- Contingent and necessary beings
- Properties in degrees
- Design
How does Aquinas first argument work?
- Some things move
- Any movement requires a cause
- The cause must be before the movement
- There are no infinite chains of movement
- There must be a first cause of movement
- It has to be outside of the natural world
- Therefore, God exists
How does Aquinas second argument work?
- There are events
- Events have causes
- Causes must preceed their events
- There are no infinite chains of events
- Therefore there must be a first event
- This event also must have a cause, but this cause cannot be another event in the natural world
- Therefore, God must have caused the first even and must exist.
What are the problems of Aquinas first two arguments?
- Premises are questionable
- Motion: Aristotles physics vs. Newton’s physics
- Birthday Fallacy
- Everyone has a birthday, therefore there must be one day that is everybody’s birthday.
- Is backward causation impossible
What are contigent and necessary truths?
- Contingent truths = truths that are true in at least one possible world
- Necessary truths = truths that are true in all possible worlds
- Possible worlds = all worlds that are (theoretically) possible; worlds that could exist
How does Aquinas third argument work? What type is it?
Reductio ad absurdem argument
- Suppose all beings where contingent
- Contingent beings come into existencs and stop existing somewhen
- If all beings were contigent, there must have been an empty time
- This empty time would have been in the past
- Then the world would also be empty now
- The world is not empty now.
- Therefore there must be a non-contingent being and that being is God
What are some of the problems of Aquinas third arguemt?
- nearly all of the premises can be doubted
- Empty time:
- birthday fallacy
- why in the past?
- Non-contigent being: why must it be God?
- Why cannot an empty world generate things?
- etc.
- Empty time:
What are a priori and a posteriori truths?
- a priori = can be known simply by use of concepts without experience or observations
- a posteriori = can only be known by experience or observations
What does “act for an end” mean?
- it means to have a function or a goal
How does Aquinas Argument from Design work?
- Aquinas, like Aristotle thought that everything acts for an end. E.g. a falling stone tries to get close to earth.
- Argument
- Some things which have a function or act for an end have minds
- Any such thing, which does not have a mind must have been designed by an intelligent designer
- Therefore there is a designer, who created all those things
- Therefore God exists
How can we critize Aquinas argument from design?
- Birthday fallacy: one designer created them all
- Sober: abductive argument
- What about H3: Evolution?
What is Paley’s watch?
- suppose you find a watch on the beach
- What is more likely?
- H1: The random movements of sand, water and wind created this sophisticated masterpieve
- H2: An intelligent designer created the watch
- Surprise principle favours H2 over H1
- Argument by analogy –> same applies to our world
What is an argument by analogy?
What are its components?
What determines its strength?
- An argument that shows one feature and tries to portray this feature on something similar
- Components
- Analog = Thing with feature
- Target = target of analogy
- Strengt depends on similarity of analog and target. Higher is better, but if identical its useless.
What is Hume’s criticism of Paley’s Watch argument?
- Watch is overall not very similar to universe
- Watch is overall not very similar to biological organisms
- Even if argument would be better, it would only conclude that there exists a being “intelligent enough”, does not prove God’s existence
What is Anselm’s Onthological Argument (for God’s existence)?
- God has maximal possible perfection
- Suppose that God did not exist
- Then someone could image a being greater then God, namely a being which has the maximal possible perfection and that does exist
- Therefore, God does exist (because he has maximal possible perfection, and non-existence would not be perfect)
How does Sober criticize Hume’s criticism?
- Argument is not necessarily an argument by analogy
- Argument is abductive in nature
- And intelligent design seems to be best explanation for highly complex and sophisticated organisms
What is the theory of evolution?
- Two hypothesis
- Single tree of life
- Modification by natural selection
What are the three approaches to the problem of evolution?
- Theistic evolutionism
- There is evolution
- God created the world and started evolution
- Atheistic evolutionism
- There is evolution
- God does not exist
- Creationism
- There is no evolution
- God designed the whole universe and all beings
What are problems with creationism?
- Testability - non falsifiable theories
- God designed everything, but planted evidence the would lead us to believe in evolution and an old earth
- Philip Gosse’s hypothesis: Earth is young, God planted evidence of old earth
- Implausibility
What is evidence for evolution?
- Similarities in DNA
- Imperfect adaptations
What is correlation and causation?
- Correlation: two events occur together
- Three types:
- Accidental correlation: pure chance
- Causal correlation: one event caused the other
- Common-cause-correlation: Both events were caused by the same cause
How can we critize Anselm’s Onthological argument?
- Gaunilo’s perfect island counter-example
- Sober:
- a definition gives conditions for something counting as that thing, definitions cannot prove existence.
What are analytical and synthetic statements?
- analytic = true or false because of concepts
- synthetic = true or false because of verifying experiences
What are local and global arguments?
- local = focus on one specific or local feature
- global = focus on some general feauture of the whole universe
What is the positivists theory of meaning?
- Every statement in principle is decidable to be true or false
- Analytically: concepts
- Synthetically: obeservation and evidence
- Some statements are not verifiable and thus meaningless.
What is Pascal’s wager?
- Gives prudential reason to believe in God
- Employs expected utility (Erwartungswert)
What are evidential and prudential reasons?
- Evidential: you got evidence to believe somehting
- Prudential: it is in your interest to believe something
What are problems with Pascal’s wager?
- It is impossible to decide to believe
- Assumptions about God:
- How can you know that God punishes believers?
- How can you know that God does not only punish people who believe in him because of Pascal’s wager?
What is Jame’s pragmatism version of the wager?
- people benefit directly from believing
- purpose
- life-guidance
- cost if God did not exists is low
What is Clifford’s reply to Pascal’s wager?
- We endanger humanity if we believe things without evidence
What is the problem of Evil?
- If God was omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent, why is there Evil in the world?
- Argument is deductively valid
Answers to problem of Evil?
- Soul-building evil
- Bad experiences can build character
- But, some evils do not, they just harm?!
- Evil due to free-will
- God gives people free-will and thus they will inevitably do some evil
What about natural Evils?
- There are some natural evils, that cannot be explained by soul-building or free-will.
- Lake Nyos: deathgas lake example in Cameroon
- Parasitic wasps
- Spider children killing and eating mother
- Human parasites
Replies to the problem of natural Evil?
- Commited by minions of Satan
- We cannot understand God’s reasons, because we are so much less intelligent, wise and knowing
