Dear Friends:
Sunday is supposed to be a day of rest and reflection so I'm going to print an article by P. Dovorsky that might tickle your fancy!
If not, or if you don't like having your fancy tickled then move on to other stuff, after all, it doesn't matter whether you agree or dis-agree, it just makes for interesting reading!
-----------------------------------
Nietzsche is famous for saying that God is dead,
but news of The Almighty's demise may have been greatly exaggerated. Here are
some of the most fascinating and provocative philosophical arguments for the
existence of God.
To be clear, these are philosophical arguments. They're neither rooted in
religious scripture nor any kind of scientific observation or fact. Many of
these arguments, some of which date back thousands of years, serve as
interesting intellectual exercises, teasing apart what we think we know about
the universe and our place within it from what we think we're capable of
knowing. Other arguments, like the last two listed, are attempts to reconcile
questions that currently plague scientists and philosophers.
8 Great Philosophical Questions That We'll Never Solve 8 Great Philosophical Questions That We'll Never Solve 8 Great Philosophical Questions That We'll Never…
Philosophy
goes where hard science can't, or won't. Philosophers have a license to…Read more on io9.com
Now, none of these arguments make a definitive case
for the existence of God, and many of them are (fairly) easily debunked or problematical (as I'll try to show). But at the very least, they offer
considerable food for thought.
Finally, by "God" or "god,"
we're not talking about any specific religious deity. As this list shows, the
term can encompass everything from a perfect, omnipotent being to something
that can be considered even a bit banal.
1) The very notion
of an all-perfect being means God has to exist
This is the classic ontological, or a priori,
argument. It was first articulated in 1070 by St. Anselm, who argued that
because we have a conception of an all-perfect being — which he defined as
"that than which nothing greater can be conceived" — it has to
exist. In his essay Proslogion, St. Anselm conceived of God as a being
who possesses all conceivable perfection. But if this being "existed"
merely as an idea in our minds, then it would be less perfect than if it actually
existed. So it wouldn't be as great as a being who actually existed, something
that would thus contradict our definition of God — a being who's supposed to be
all-perfect. Thus, God must exist.
Okay, admittedly, this sounds a bit weird by modern
standards. Actually, it even sounded weird back then; Gaunilo of Marmoutiers
ripped apart Anselm's idea by asking people to conceive of an island "more
excellent" than any other island, revealing the flaws in this type of
argumentation.
Today, we know that this type of a priori argument (i.e.,
pure deduction) is grossly limited, often tautological, and utterly fails to
take empirical evidence into account.
But surprisingly, it was a position defended by
none other than Rene Descartes. His take on the matter is a bit more
illustrative; Descartes, in his Fifth Meditation, wrote that the
conception of a perfect being who lacks existence is like imagining a triangle
whose interior angles don't sum to 180 degrees (he was big on the notion of innate
ideas and the doctrine of clear and distinct perception). So, because we have
the idea of a supremely perfect being, we have to conclude that a supremely
perfect being exists; to Descarte, God's existence was just as obvious,
logical, and self-evident as the most basic mathematical truths.
2) Something must
have caused the Universe to exist
Philosophers call this one the First-Cause Argument, or the Cosmological Argument, and early advocates of this line of reasoning included Plato, Aristotle, and St. Thomas Aquinas. It's predicated on the assumption that every event must have a cause, and that cause in turn must have a cause, and on and on and on. Assuming there's no end to this regression of causes, this succession of events would be infinite. But an infinite series of causes and events doesn't make sense (a causal loop cannot exist, nor a causal chain of infinite length). There's got to be something — some kind of first cause — that is itself uncaused. This would require some kind of "unconditioned" or "supreme" being — which the philosophers call God.
I'm sure you've already come up with your own
objections to the First-Cause Argument, including the issue of a first-causer
having to have its own cause. Also, infinity does in fact
appear to be a fundamental quality of the universe. All this said,
however, cosmologists are still struggling to understand the true nature of
time and what "caused" the Big Bang to happen in the first place.
3) There has to be
something rather than nothing
Called the Cosmological Argument from Contingency,
this is a slightly different take on the First-Cause Argument. The German
philosopher Gottfried Leibniz put it best when he wrote,
Why is there something rather than
nothing? The sufficient reason... is found in a substance which... is a
necessary being bearing the reason for its existence within itself.
Because it's impossible for only contingent beings
to exist, he argued, a necessary being must exist — a being we call God.
Writing in Monadology, he wrote that "no fact can be real or
existing and no statement true without a sufficient reason for its being so and
not otherwise."
.
More recently, the philosopher Richard Swinburne
looked at the issue more inductively, writing,
There is quite a chance that if there
is a God he will make something of the finitude and complexity of a universe.
It is very unlikely that a universe would exist uncaused, but rather more
likely that God would exist uncaused. The existence of the universe…can be made
comprehensible if we suppose that it is brought about by God.
4) Something had to
have designed the Universe
The Design Argument, or teleological argument,
suggests we live in a Universe that surely had to be designed. The cosmos, goes
the argument, exhibits orderliness and (apparent) purpose — for example,
everything within the universe adheres to the laws of physics, and many things
within it are correlated with one another in a way that appears purposeful. As
William Paley argued, just as the existence of a watch indicates the presence
of an intelligent mind, the existence of the universe and various phenomena
within it indicates the presence of an even greater intelligence, namely God.
Needless to say, this line of argumentation was far
more compelling prior to the advent of naturalism (the idea that everything can
be explained without the benefit of supernatural intervention) and Darwinian evolution. Indeed, Darwin served as a kind of death knell to the Design Argument, at least as far as
the biological realm is concerned. We know that the human eye — in all its
apparent complexity and purpose — is not the product of a designer, but rather
the painstaking result of variation and selection.
Does
the new Pope believe in evolution? Does
the new Pope believe in evolution? Does
the new Pope believe in evolution?
The
answer is actually yes. And in fact, the Roman Catholic Church has recognized
Darwinian…Read
more on io9.com
The Top 10 Claims Made by Creationists to Counter Scientific Theories The Top 10 Claims Made by Creationists to Counter Scientific Theories The Top 10 Claims Made by Creationists to Counter…
One
of the most challenging tasks for the modern day creationist to is reconcile
the belief in a…Read more on io9.com
But the Design Argument isn't entirely dead yet.
The exquisite fine-tuning of the "biophilic universe" has lead some
to conclude there is in fact a greater intelligence at work. To counter this
line of reasoning, however, philosophers say we should simply defer to the anthropic principle, which is interesting because
theists say the same thing!
How does the Anthropic Principle change the meaning of the universe?
How does the Anthropic Principle change the meaning of the
universe? How does the Anthropic Principle change the…
One
of the more extraordinary things about the universe is that it has produced
beings who can…Read more on io9.com
5) Consciousness
proves that immaterial entities exist
We still don't have a working theory of
consciousness, giving rise to the notorious Hard Problem. Indeed, subjective
awareness, or qualia, is quite unlike anything we normally deal with in our
otherwise material universe. The weirdness of consciousness, and our inability
to understand it, has given rise to the notion of substance dualism, also known
as Cartesian dualism, which describes two fundamental kinds of stuff:
the mental and the material. Dualists say that material on its own is incapable
of producing qualia — one's capacity to have internal thoughts, subjective
awareness, and feelings.
Theists have used substance dualism to make the
claim for an independent "realm" of existence that's distinct from
the physical world. It's a scenario similar to the one experience by Neo in The
Matrix; his mental experiences occurred in a realm separate from the one
that hosted his body. Theistic philosophers have taken this idea to the next
level, using it to infer the existence of otherworldly or immaterial entities,
including God. It's a bit of a stretch, and an argument that could use a lot
more evidence.
6) We're living in a
computer simulation run by hacker gods
Physicists
say there may be a way to prove that we live in a computer simulation Physicists
say there may be a way to prove that we live in a computer simulation Physicists
say there may be a way to prove that…
Back
in 2003, Oxford professor Nick Bostrom suggested that we may be living in a
computer…Read
more on io9.com
7) Aliens are our
gods
We have yet to make contact with an
extraterrestrial intelligence, but that doesn't mean they're not out there. A
possible solution to the Fermi Paradox is the notion of directed panspermia — the
idea that aliens spark life on other planets, like sending spores or probes to
fertile planets, and then leave, or monitor and control the process covertly.
By definition, therefore, they would be like gods to us.
This idea has been addressed many times in scifi,
including the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The
Chase", in which a god-like species is responsible for all life in the
Alpha Quadrant, or Ridley Scott's Prometheus, in which an alien can be
seen seeding the primordial Earth with life. Even Arthur C. Clarke's 2001
is a take on this idea, with the monoliths instigating massive evolutionary
leaps.
Follow me on Twitter: @dvorsky
No comments:
Post a Comment