Philosophy of Religion Flashcards
1
Q
Essay plan on religious language
A
- Intro
- Will be arguing that religious statements can be meaningful
- Ayer’s attempt fails and Wittgenstein gives a successful account - What religious language is
- Will be focussing on statements about God (most problematic for philosophers)
- Meaningless: can’t be true or false, makes no difference to our understanding of the world - Ayer’s Verification Principle
- What it is
- Explain analytic and empirically verifiable - Applied to religious statements
- Religious statements aren’t analytic or empirically verifiable
- So are meaningless - Hick’s reply
- If there is life after death, can verify statements about God
- So statements about God could be meaningful
- Could be a problem for Ayer, but he as bigger problems - Verification principle is self-defeating
- Verification principle is not analytic or empirically verifiable
- So not a good argument - Idea still interesting
- Still agree there is a connection between truth and meaning
- Picture example
- But can’t use it as conclusive proof - Wittgenstein general
- Should look at how words are used
- Swimming pool example - Language games
- The way we speak are language games
- ‘sick’ example - Applied to religious language
- Statements about God aren’t about things that exist in the world
- They express a strong commitment that person has to a way of life - Objection
- Can’t justify religious beliefs
- Goes against our intuitions - Reply
- People who talk about religious beliefs as if they can be verified literally don’t understand the language game they are trying to join
- TV show example - Conclusion
- Wittgenstein successfully replies
- Statements about God can be meaningful
2
Q
Essay plan on reducing religion to science and social science
A
- Intro
- Will be arguing religion can’t be reduced to science
- Can’t be reduced to social science, focussing on politics and therapy - Explaining the question
- What reductionism is (lightning example)
- What social science covers (law, psychology, therapy, politics etc)
- Will first assess view that religion can be reduced to science - Religion can be reduced to science
- Religion offers explanations
- Eg Big Bang, God caused the Big Bang, or God created the Universe, and Big Bang didn’t occur
- Eg evil, God has a higher plan for us
- Religion provides explanations, just as science does - Objection
- Does this help us understand science better? (No)
- Religion fills in the gaps
- ‘It was God’ = ‘I don’t understand’
- Religion can’t be reduced to science - Religion can be reduced to therapy
- God also provides comfort, and someone who will listen
- Can all aspects of God be explained in terms of therapy? - Objection
- God doesn’t only provide comfort, also brings people together etc
- Can’t account for every aspect of religion in terms of therapy
- Religion can’t be reduced to therapy - Religion can be reduced to politics
- Does provide a unified belief system
- Functionalists argue that the world is an organism that has needs
- We need politics to survive so we need religion to survive - Objection
- Hume’s conflicting truth claims
- Different miracles from different religions can’t all be true
- Doesn’t work (different political parties have different beliefs but we still function effectively) - Problem with ‘explaining away’ religion at all
- If religion can be explained in terms of politics, this contradicts what we usually think about religion
- Religion is complex, and isn’t there for just one reason
- Game example, (games facilitate social bonds, or reduce stress, but is this really the point of the game?)
- Same can be said for religion, does provide comfort and social order, but is more than that - Conclusion
- Attempts to explain away religion fail
- Shouldn’t be trying to explain away religion at all
3
Q
Essay plan on miracles
A
- Intro
- Will be arguing miracles tell us a lot about God
- We are justified in beliefs based on miracles
- Hume’s argument fails, as does argument from conflicting truth claims - Miracles
- Original meaning: experiencing awe or wonder
- Hume’s and Spinoza’s definition: violation of laws of nature
- Holland rejects this (laws of nature can’t be broken)
- Will use Hume’s and Spinoza’s definition - What miracles tell us
- Can tell us a lot about God’s nature
- Eg Feeding the 5000 tells us God is all-powerful and all-loving, that he exists - Evidence for miracles
- All testimony (scripture or someone reporting)
- We often accept testimony as evidence eg in a court case
- Don’t often accept testimony of miracles
- When we don’t accept testimony: person has a tendency to make false judgements, if they were drunk, or if the event was extremely unlikely
- Hume focuses on last point - Miracles aren’t impossible
- No contradiction for Hume to say ‘Jesus walked on water’
- Always irrational to accept testimony about miracles
- Should ask what is more likely, (a) miracle occurred or (b) testimony is false? (b) likely - we make mistakes, (a) unlikely
- Hume’s maxim
- Eg feeding the 5000 - Proves too much
- Can’t accept testimony about any unlikely events
- Doesn’t fit with everyday life
- But Hume has bigger problems - Bigger Problem
- Hume supports argument by saying people who give testimony of miracles aren’t qualified to give reliable testimony
- Weakens is argument
- Qualified doctors say that miracles occur - Hume’s reply
- Haven’t fully understood science
- Not really a miracle - Problem
- Can apply this to all miracles
- We haven’t understood the laws of nature
- Miracle’s can’t occur as Hume defines them
- Argument fails - Argument from competing truth claims
- Why we form beliefs: to get an accurate picture of the world
- Different religions have different pictures of the world, so can’t all be accurate
- Descartes example (tower looks cuboid far away, but cylindrical far away, can’t be both)
- Eg There is one God (Christianity) and there are many gods (Hinduism) - Pluralism
- Reply to this
- All religions partially true, but don’t give a complete description of reality
- Elephant and 3 blind men illustration - Problems
- Aren’t completely justified in beliefs about God’s nature, may only be partly true
- Reduces significance of miracles, can’t establish religions (there is not one accurate complete picture) - Incommensurability
- Stronger argument against competing truth claims
- Dissolves problem rather than solves it
- Religions can’t be compared, so can’t contradict one another
- Eg when we discovered Earth was round, can’t compare that to the flat Earth, because they are totally different worlds
- All religions accurately describe their own world - Conclusion
- Incommunsurability is a convincing response to conflicting truth claims
- Both arguments fail so can still be justified in beliefs about God based on miracles
4
Q
State Hume’s maxim
A
No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact that it endeavours to establish
5
Q
Explain Swinburne’s categorisation of religious experiences
A
- Does this so we can assess REs fairly and impose restrictions on what the experiences reveal
- 1: Public, experiencing God in nature
e.g. looking at the night sky, God created something so beautiful
2: Public, witnessing an unusual event with other
eg Jesus walking on water
3: Private, can be explained using conceptual terms
eg Angel Gabriel appearing to Mary and telling her she was having the son of God
4: Private, can’t be explained using conceptual terms
eg Pythia, described by William James as ineffable, noetic, transient and passive
5: Private, general feeling that God is guiding one’s life, not based on a specific experience
6
Q
What is Mike Martin’s argument for the existence of God based on religious experience?
A
1) Under C conditions, religious beliefs generated by religious experiences are probably true
2) C conditions have been met
3) My religious belief that God exists was generated by a religious experience
So, (4) My belief that God exists is probably true
7
Q
Essay plan on religious experiences
A
- Intro
- Can’t infer knowledge of God directly from experience
- REs could be used as evidence, but we can’t be sure the religious experience was caused by God - Religious experiences
- 2 possibilities for experiencing constituting knowledge: direct inference, or evidence in an argument, will discuss both
- Swinburne’s definition: episodes through which an individual is immediately aware of an unseen reality - Categories
- Swinburne’s 5 categories of REs - Everyday life
- When would we usually accept experience as evidence?
- Swinburne’s principle of credulity
- Can we apply it to religious experiences? - Comparing REs to everyday experiences
- Everyday: can ask someone to verify what we’re seeing, and can go back the next day to check
- Can’t do this with REs
- Can’t use principle of credulity - Experience as direct knowledge
- Some people think we don’t need an argument
- Obstetricians case
- She hasn’t gained any knowledge, just applied her knowledge to experience (Peter Donovan) - Mike Martin
- Criticised argument then reconstructed it
- Weak conclusion (God probably exists) - Questions
- When are we ever justified in believing (1)?
- Under those conditions we can use experience as evidence for God
- What are the conditions? (Swinburne mentions some but are these ever met?)
- If we have alternate explanations to what caused the religious experience, can’t have direct inference that religious experiences were caused by God - Persinger
- Religious experiences are caused by pressure on the temporal lobes
- Conducted experiments - Reply
- Doesn’t prove experience definitely wasn’t caused by God
- God could’ve stimulated temporal lobes - Ockham’s razor
- Should always choose simplest explanation
- Persinger’s explanation is simplest of the 3
- Shouldn’t be used as a stand-alone argument, but makes it less likely God caused the RE - Conclusion
- Can’t use RE as direct knowledge of God
- More likely that experience wasn’t caused by God, but not impossible He exists
8
Q
Essay plan on the cosmological argument
A
- Intro
- Will be arguing that cosmological argument doesn’t prove existence of God
- Only proves that the universe had an uncaused cause - Cosmological arguments
- Lots of forms
- Indirect form of argument
- Aquinas’ cosmological argument
- Problems with this
- Will be focussing on Kalam cosmological argument (strongest) - Kalam cosmological argument
- Premise form
- Stronger conclusion
- Valid argument
- Will assess premises individually - Premise (i)
- Hume believed we should’t accept this
- Can imagine something coming into existence without a cause
- Rabbit example - Problem with Hume
- Could say we were the cause of the rabbit
- Just because we can imagine something, doesn’t follow that it could happen in reality
- Premise (i) seems plausible, at least inductively - Premise (ii)
- Should argue a priori
- Universe must be a potential infinite
- Otherwise the present would never have occurred (infinity + 1 = infinity)
- Premise (ii) is true - Premises (iii) and (iv)
- Follows that premise (iii) is true, because argument is valid
- Can argue for (iv) in same way as (ii) - no actual infinities
- Main problem is with premise (v) - Moreland’s argument
- Premise form - Explain
- (b) is true because otherwise the conditions coming into existence would be first event, rather than universe coming into existence
- Problem with (b) (no time before universe, how can the conditions have existed) - Even if
- Even if we did accept argument, has just proved the cause of the universe was personal
- Not eg God of Christianity exists who is omnibenevolent, omnipotent etc - Reply
- Moreland might argue that we can look at the universe and see the nature of God - Question begging
- Moreland has begged the question
- Assuming God made the universe to prove He did - Conclusion
- Cosmological argument doesn’t prove God’s existence
- Only proves the universe had an uncaused cause
9
Q
Aquinas’ cosmological argument in premise form
A
(1) Everything that exists has a cause of its existence
(2) Nothing can be the cause of itself
(3) The universe exists (from (1) and (2))
So (4) The universe has a cause that is independent of the universe itself
10
Q
Kalam cosmological argument in premise form
A
(i) Everything that begins to exist has a cause
(ii) The universe began to exist
(iii) The universe had a cause (from (i) and (ii))
(iv) The cause of the universe itself must be uncaused (to rule out infinite regress)
(v) God is the only uncaused cause
so (vi) God exists (from (iii) to (v))
11
Q
Moreland’s argument for a personal God in premise form
A
(a) The cause of the beginning of the universe was either mechanical or personal
(b) The conditions that caused the universe to exist were present and unchanging before the universe came into being
(c) But if the conditions were present and the process was mechanical, the universe would have existed for all eternity, because mechanical processes occur as soon as the conditions are present
So (d) the cause of the universe must be a personal God
