OCR Philosophy of ReligionHold Ctrl and click on the following links:

Ancient Philosophical Influences

Soul, Mind & Body

Teleological argument

Cosmological argument

Ontological argument

Religious Experience

The Problem of Evil

The nature or attributes of God

Religious language: Negative, Analogical or symbolic

20 th Century Philosophy of Language

Ancient Philosophical Influences

PlatoHeraclitus was an ancient Greek Philosopher who thought that everything we experience through our senses changes and is imperfect so everything is in ‘flux’. He said a person never steps in the same river twice, because the river has changed. So Heraclitus thought true eternal unchanging knowledge is impossible because even if you know something now, it is bound to change.

Plato agreed with Heraclitus that knowledge cannot be gained from a posteriori observation but thought that nonetheless we have somehow managed to gain knowledge of mathematics (like geometry) and abstract concepts like perfect beauty (aesthetics) and justice (morality).

Plato concludes there must be a world where things are perfect and unchanging (immutable) which he called the World of Forms. The world of forms is not some distant world like heaven – it is the true reality. What we see (the world of particulars/appearances) is not the true reality. Everything we experience is a vague shadow of what it really is, which are perfect forms of what we see. For example, if we see a beautiful painting we are really looking at the form of beauty but our perception is faulty so we see a particular beautiful thing which is not perfectly beautiful.

The argument from recollection/innate concepts is how Plato argues for the forms based on the fact that we seem to have a concept of perfect beauty and justice in our minds by which we judge what things or situations are more or less beautiful/just than others.

P1 - We have a concept of perfect justice and beauty.P2 - We have never experienced perfect instances of such things.C1 - therefore we must have gained those concepts from the world of the forms.

We are born with a dim recollection of the forms because our immortal soul observes them before being reincarnated. Anamnesis is the process of re-remembering these forms through a posteriori sense experience.

Criticism #1: Justice and beauty are subjective. Beauty and morality are arguably in the eye of the beholder. They seem like matters of opinion, not fact. It seems to be culture that determines and conditions what a person finds beautiful or just. So, there is no objectively perfect beauty or justice.

Plato could try to respond by claiming that just because people have different opinions, that doesn’t make beauty/justice subjective. It could be that culture moves people further from the original concept they got from the world of the forms.

It’s true that cultures change someone’s view of what counts as justice/beauty, but Plato could point ask how did everyone get this idea of justice/beauty itself?

We could have evolved the concepts or ideas of beauty and justice. In that case, regardless of whether they are objectively or subjectively perfect, they did not come from the world of forms and so Plato’s argument fails.

Criticism #2: Hume argues we can gain concepts of perfect things through our experience (a posteriori) by infering from imperfect things. Hume claims we take our concept of ‘imperfect’ and simply imagine the negation ‘not imperfect’ to arrive at ‘perfect’.

Plato could respond to Hume by switching to the example of Geometry. In The Meno Plato tells the story of how Socrates attempts to prove that a slave boy who had no education could nonetheless be prompted by a series of questions and some shapes drawn in the sand,

to figure out how to solve a geometry question. The conclusion is that humans have innate knowledge of geometric truths gained from when our souls existed in the world of forms.

An empiricist could respond that we gain the concepts of number and shape from experience and then gain mathematical knowledge when analysing those concepts. The slave boy may not have had any mathematical training, but he had seen shapes of objects in his life – thereby gaining concepts of shape and geometry. The geometric knowledge is therefore gained via analytic a priori reasoning about concepts gained from experience.

The relationship between forms and particulars.

Particulars are imperfect copies/representations of the form they participate in of which they gain characteristics. When I look at a tree I am really looking at the eternal immutable form of treeness, but because of my ignorance I see a particular tree which is transient and mutable, it will decay and change into something else as it is in a state of flux.

The tree gets what little treeness it has by ‘partaking’ in the form of treeness. It’s like looking at an object in a broken mirror and perceiving a visually distorted version of it. In the case of Plato’s form however, we are perceiving the forms through the broken mirror of our ignorant minds and what we perceive is not a mere visual distortion but a distortion in reality.

Plato seems to think that the world can be divided up into categories like tree, table, beauty, etc. Plato doesn’t see how we could recognize a tree unless we already have a perfect abstract ideal of a tree; ‘treeness’, against which we can compare and thus recognize a particular tree due to it being an imperfect representation of treeness. Since the world of appearances is in flux, how is it that we manage to recognize different things through categorisation? Since the river we step into the first time is no longer the same river it seems impossible to think of the world in an orderly categorized way if all we have to go on is a world of flux. So Plato concludes we actually have a dim recollection of the forms of which the world of appearances share some dim shadow-like characteristics by which we are able to recognize and categorize them.

Wittgenstein argued that actually there is no perfect form or abstract ideal of a category. He gave an example of a family picture. There are similarities between the members of the family but it would be absurd to suggest this required a perfect abstracted form of the family. Instead we recognize someone as a member of a family due to their family resemblances. Similarly, we recognize a member of a category as being so due to its family resemblances to other things in that category.

The world is not a set of definable categories which the human mind can perfectly divide up. It’s not clear where the boundary between tree and bush are for example, in some species. Humans divide the world linguistically and conceptually not according to, or at least not only according to, an objective set or method categorization. We categorize the world in a disorganised haphazard way when and where we require certain use of the category in question. The categories are determined by social convention, not objective reality. Categories are not metaphysical, they are conceptual schemes mapped onto a human experience of the world for the purpose of performing a specific function or use. As such, they have indeterminate boundaries and are subject to revision. What someone decides to call a tree might depend on the use for which the category ‘tree’ has in their social environment. There is no perfect form of ‘treeness’.

This relies on Wittgenstein’s theory of language games and so is vulnerable to criticisms of that.

Plato thinks we get knowledge of the forms through a priori reason, not a posteriori empirical sense experience – since experience reveals merely a vague shadow of the world of forms. Humans ignorantly believe the particulars are the true world.

The Analogy of the Cave illustrates this. Plato asks us to imagine some prisoners in a cave who cannot move due to being chained, and can only look in one direction at a wall on which appear shadows of real objects moving behind the prisoners that they cannot see. Those shadows are all the prisoners have ever known, and so they develop a language to talk about them as if they were real. One day a prisoner escapes, is temporarily blinded by the sun, and then sees the real world. He returns to the cave to explain the truth to the other prisoners, but they cannot understand him.

It seems that people can actually understand Philosophers though, as proven by their significant impact on culture and book sales.

Prisoners – PeopleShackled – Belief in sense (ignorance)Shadows – Sense experienceOne day one escapes the cave – PhilosopherIs temporarily blinded by the sun – Acquiring knowledge of the form of the goodThen sees the real world outside – Acquiring knowledge of the world of the formsReturns to the cave, tries to explain what they saw, but the other prisoners are unable to understand – Philosopher unable to explain these ideas

Ayer!

Modern science seems to get beyond our senses or what Plato would call ‘the shadows’ to tell us how reality is, e.g. E=MC2. It even allows us to manipulate the shadows, e.g. landing a space rocket on the moon. This should not be possible if they are mere shadows, therefore Plato is wrong. He’s right to think there is something beyond them, but it’s empirical evidence from science which shows what it really is, and it’s not the world of the forms.

Physicist Max Tegmark believes in the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis which is that the universe isn’t just amenable to mathematical description but actually is ‘made’ from pure mathematics in some sense. That could be argued to be similar to Plato’s idea of the forms.

Aristotle’s third man argument. Plato claims that if there is a group of things which share characteristics, like a group of trees, then the explanation is that they must all be partaking in a form of treeness. However, Aristotle argues that we then have a new group of things which share characteristics, the trees and the form of treeness, which according to Plato’s logic must therefore have a form in which they partake, yet that simply creates a new group of things which share characteristics which require another form and so on forever.

Plato responds that forms cannot partake of anything but themselves. The particulars partake in a form because they are imperfect copies of it but the forms themselves cannot then be grouped with the particulars since they are what the particulars really are.

The form of the good is like the sun according to Plato, in that it both illuminates and allows us to see the world of the forms, and yet also nourishes and is responsible for all the existence of life and all the other forms, so it is the highest form. All the other forms have goodness

in them. The Form of the Good is the source of truth, beauty and justice. Understanding the form of the good makes it impossible for you to do wrong and so Plato says you should rule the people as a ‘philosopher king’.

Arguably Plato is just projecting his psychological need for goodness onto reality. Physical objects do perhaps have some basis in reality beyond our mere perception but ‘goodness’ is not even really perceived outside our mind so in what sense could it be a shadow of a more real thing?

Aristotle’s criticism. It’s simple to see how e.g ‘tall’ would have a single essence of ‘tallness’ however ‘the good’ seems different as it is spoken about in many different ways. That makes it seem unlikely that goodness could be one simple thing like Plato’s conception of the form of the good requires. Aristotle argues that things which can be put under a single idea or form should be confinable to a single subject area or discipline. The good of war comes under the science of strategy, the good related to diseases is in the science of medicine, the good of bodily exercise comes under gymnastics.

Nietzsche claimed that Philosophers invent their theories to justify their pre-conceived prejudices. Arguably Plato just felt like he should be in power and so invented the form of the good as an excuse. The fact that only those in power would be able to see this form of the good adds to that suspicion.

Arguably Nietzsche commits the genetic fallacy however; assuming that the motivations someone might have for coming to a belief can be used to prove it false. Plato could have invented the form of the Good as an excuse to rule, and yet there still be a form of the good.

Nonetheless Nietzsche’s approach could be considered to provide not a disproof but a justifiable scepticism of Plato.

AristotleAristotle rejected Plato’s epistemology and the theory of the forms with it. Instead of basing knowledge on a priori logic, Aristotle thought we could gain knowledge through a posteriori empiricism. Plato thought the true reality did not change, Aristotle wanted to come up with an empiricist understanding of change instead.

Actuality is the way something is in its current state. Potentiality is the way actual things could become given certain conditions. If certain conditions are met, it will change to its potentiality and that will become its actuality. For example, a seed has the potential to become a tree but only if certain conditions are met will that potential become actual. To go from cause to an effect something must change by going through 4 causes.

Cause:- Material (what it is made of)- Formal (what its characteristics/essence are)- Efficient (how it comes to be – what exerts the force)- Final (what it is for)

Effect:- Telos - the final end towards which something is directed due to its nature.

Aristotle thought that all change in the universe must be explained by these four causes.

Aristotle observed that if an object is moved, it keeps moving and then stops. Aristotle thought that objects which are moved simply run out of movement after a while and that the natural state of objects was to be at rest. He therefore thought that motion which does not stop required some special explanation. It was this view which led to his inference of the existence of a prime mover of the universe.

Aristotle then asked the four causes of the universe.

The Material cause of the universe is determined by the constituent elements of matter and the ether (space between matter).

The Formal cause of the universe is in the nature of things, such as the nature of stars to rotate

The Efficient cause in the universe is the movement of the stars which changes the ether which maintains the rotation of the planets which maintains changes in the planet’s atmosphere, which maintains the processes of change on the earth. Aristotle had a geocentric view of the universe; that the earth was in the centre of it.

Aristotle then questions what maintains the motion of the stars, inferring that there must be something moving them which itself must be unmoved. The cause of the motion of the stars and thereby all movement on earth must itself be unmoved, or its movement would require merely another mover. There cannot be an infinite chain of motion as that would never get started.

This prime mover must therefore have been unmoved and therefore cannot change. It is therefore pure actuality. So, it cannot be material since it seems all material things are subject to change. It must be a mind, but arguably it cannot be thinking about anything happening outside itself since such things are subject to change and its thoughts would change if their object changed. So it must be eternally contemplating itself. The way the prime mover sustains the change in the world must therefore be due to some sort of attraction of the things in this world to it.

The prime mover is that unmoved mover. It is not the efficient cause of the universe, since Aristotle believed the universe was eternal. The Prime Mover is responsible for the everlasting motion and change of the universe. Since it cannot be moved, it cannot change and is thus pure actuality. It is only form but no materiality, a kind of mind, which eternally contemplates itself, otherwise it would contemplate things which change and would then itself change. Our universe is attracted to the prime mover in a sort of orbit. That is how the prime mover sustains the pattern of change from actuality to potentiality in our universe.

Newton challenged Aristotle’s belief that an object which is moved will simply stop moving by itself. Newton claimed instead that when moved, an object will move until met by an equal and opposite reaction. The problem with observing this is that on earth, the strong gravity and effect of friction amounts to an equal and opposite reaction on the movement of an object which causes it to stop. It doesn’t just stop by itself due to rest being its natural state, as Aristotle thought. This means that Aristotle’s inference that the constant motion in the universe must be maintained by something like a prime mover is false.

Newton’s ideas are most clearly illustrated in the example of a vacuum – space. In outer space where there is less gravity and friction, pushing an object in a certain direction will cause it to move

in that direction potentially forever, unless it happens to hit another object or is pulled off course by the gravity of something like a planet.

Although Newton is seen by scientists as disproving Aristotle, arguably Einstein disproved Newton too and who knows which future physics might disprove Einstein. Arguably science just continually changes its preferred view and so it’s unreliable as a source of knowledge.

Scientist Neil DeGrasse Tyson responded that Einstein did not ‘disprove’ Newton. Newton’s laws of motion are still accepted as true. Physicists now know much more about the universe than Newton did, however, so that opens up a space of knowledge around Newton’s theorems which require embedding in a different theory. Newton’s views still work for what they explain, it’s just that we now know there is much more in the universe to explain which requires other theories like Einsteins’. Aristotle’s physics however is not regarded as accurate by modern physicists even for some small part of the universe.

Sartre argued that there was no objective purpose because “existence precedes essence” meaning humans exist before they have a defined purpose and so have to subjectively define their purpose for themselves. Sartre’s argument was a psychological one, that people cling to fabricated notions of objective purpose like religion or Aristotle’s ‘final cause’ because they are afraid of not having a purpose, more specifically they are scared of the intensity of the freedom that comes from having to create their own purpose which Sartre thought led to feelings of abandonment (by God/objective reality), anguish (over the weight of being completely responsible for your actions) and despair (over our inability to act exactly as we’d like due to the constraints of the world). It’s much easier to believe in objective purpose than face that existential angst.

As Sartre’s argument is psychological, he does not provide metaphysical grounds for rejecting Aristotle’s final cause and so is arguably committing the genetic fallacy.

Nonetheless pointing out that humans have a psychological need to believe in objective purpose, if true, should make us extra sceptical of claims that it exists and if Aristotle’s arguments for it fail, or if he provided insufficient argument for it, we might consider Sartre’s psychological argument as accurate.

Plato’s a priori logic vs Aristotle’s a posteriori empirical observation

Plato believed that because the sensible world was in flux, eternal unchanging truth could not be gained from it. It was thus that he created his world of forms to suggest everything we see are just shadows of the real. Aristotle disagreed, thinking that he could observe in the flux patterns of change which pointed to a deep underlying causal mechanism from which could be deduced the cause of everything – the prime mover.

Plato’s theory of forms is one explanation of a sensible world of flux. However, there could be other explanations. Perhaps it was created by an 11th dimensional alien. Perhaps it was made from quantum fluctuations. There are an infinite number of possible explanations we could come up with. Therefore, unless we have some evidence to anchor the world we perceive to a merely logically possible theory, that theory has a 1/infinity chance of being the right one. Aristotle based his prime mover theory off the evidence of his senses and therefore had a better chance of being right.

Aristotle nonetheless only believed in empirical observation, not empirical experiment. For two thousand years people believed Aristotle that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects, until Galileo, according to legend, proved otherwise by dropping one heavy and one light object from the leaning tower of Pisa, and it was seen that they hit the ground together. Aristotle’s views on causation and the prime mover are considered completely wrong by modern science, as are Plato’s, so arguably neither are better?

While Aristotle was not truly scientific in the modern sense, nonetheless he believed in empirical observation which gave his theory a better chance of connecting to reality than Plato’s did, and created the epistemological method which would lead to modern empirical methods and the resulting fuller picture of reality we have today.

Soul, mind and body

Dualism: - The view that there are two fundamentally different types of existence, e.g. mental and physical.

Plato believed the body was like a prison for the soul, trapping it in this world of appearances. He thought our souls came from the world of forms and had a vague memory of the forms.

Look up charioteer analogy

Plato’s cycle of opposites argument. Every quality exists because of its opposite - big things are big because there are small things. People who are awake now are only so because they were asleep before, and vice versa. Plato claims the same is true of death. Therefore there is a cycle of the opposites of life and death, people continually die and are reborn.

Opposites don’t actually exist, they’re just mental constructs. In reality things are only ‘big’ or ‘small’ relative to something else. What looks big to us might look small to something much bigger. So ‘big’ and small cannot be intrinsic or objective as they only obtain relatively.

There’s no reason to think life and death cycle like waking and sleeping.

Descartes argued that the soul exists. He was a dualist which means he believed there are two substances (a substance is a fundamental type of existence which doesn’t depend on anything else) - mental and physical. The essence of mental substance is thinking, the essence of physical substance is extension. The indivisibility argument. Leibniz’ law is that identical things must share the same properties. The physical has the property of being divisible but the mental does not. Therefore, they are not identical.

The mental is divisible. The mind can be divided into perception, memory, emotions and so on. Freud proposed the Id, Ego and Superego.

Descartes argued that although the mind has these separate abilities or modes, that does not count as division of the mind because it is still the same mind that perceives, that remembers, that has emotions, experiences the animalistic desires of the Id and conditioned information of the Superego, and so on.

blindsight & separate awareness of the brain hemispheres.

Not everything thought of as physical is divisible e.g. quarks.Arguably science might one day discover that quarks can be divided.

The conceivability argument - we can conceive of the mind without the body, therefore it is possible for the mind to be separate from the body, therefore the mind is not identical to the body.

P1 – I have a clear and distinct idea of myself as a thinking non-extended thingP2 – I have a clear and distinct idea of my body as a non-thinking extended thingP3 – what is conceivable is possibleC1 – therefore the mind and body can possibly be separate, so they are not identical

E.g. we cannot conceive of a triangle without 3 sides because it is truly identical with the property of having 3 sides.

The mind can only be conceived separate from the body by someone ignorant of the nature of its connection to the body. E.g imagining yourself as a ghost floating through walls not interacting with the physical. What is being conceived of there is actually not the true mind, but a concept of the mind based on ignorance.

Dennett seems to be presupposing that consciousness is the sum of the parts of bodily functions and not anything additional.

Dennett’s point is that it is dualists who use conceivability arguments to claim to be imagining consciousness separate from the body whose conception of consciousness presupposes its separability from the body in order for what they are imagining to genuinely be consciousness. Until we have decided what consciousness actually is, how are we to decide that what people claim to imagine it to be really is consciousness? This seems to cast doubt on the validity of any conceivability argument.

What is conceivable may not be possible. E.g the masked man fallacy. Imagine I heard that someone had robbed a bank wearing a mask. I can conceive that they are not my father. However, if they really were my father then it wouldn’t be possible for them to not be my father. Therefore, I had conceived of something that was not possible. Therefore, what is conceivable isn’t necessarily what is possible. Just because we can conceive of the mind and body as separate, doesn’t mean it’s actually possible for them to be separate.

Ryle claimed Descartes was making a category mistake. Descartes says that physical things are extended, divisible and are non-thinking. Descartes argues that since the mind is non-extended, indivisible and thinking, it must therefore be a non-physical thing. Ryle argues that conclusion does not follow. Just because the mind is not a physical thing, that doesn’t mean it must be a non-physical thing.

Ryle told the story of someone being shown around a university. After they had been shown the various buildings, they then asked ‘but where is the university?’ They had mistakenly thought the university belonged to the category of ‘buildings’, rather than in the category of ‘a collection of buildings’. It’s as if they asked ‘what is the taste of blue’? Ryle argues that the language we use to describe the mind confuses us about the logical category it belongs to. We use the word ‘state’ and ‘process’ to describe physical things, but also use those words to describe mental terms. Since only physical ‘things’ can be in physical states or undergo physical processes, we thereby confuse ourselves into thinking that the mind must also be a ‘thing’ as it can be in mental states or undergo mental processes. Descartes, on the basis of that confusion, finds himself unable to locate a physical

‘thing’ that could be the mind and so wrongly concludes that it must be a non-physical thing – mental substance.

Ryle claims Descartes mistakenly puts the mind into the category of ‘things’ when really Ryle believes the mind is a set of dispositions. E.g. the brittleness of glass is the disposition of the glass to shatter upon impact. Is the brittleness of the glass a ‘thing’? Where is it? Clearly such questions don’t make sense. Dispositions are not things. So for Ryle, who thinks of the mind as a disposition, it makes no sense to treat the mind as belonging to the category of ‘things’ or ‘substances’. It is the way we talk about the mind that confuses us on that point.

However, is the mind really a set of dispositions? Doesn’t it ‘feel like’ something to have a mind?

Ryle might be wrong that the mind is a set of dispositions, but he’s right to point out Descartes’ assumption that because the mind is not a physical thing, the only option is for it to be a non-physical thing. Who knows what other options there could be, aside from dispositions. Descartes’ conclusion at the very least requires much more justification than he gives.

Ryle and behaviourism in general was influenced by Ayer’s verification principle. Since mental states are private they are unverifiable, so talk about them is meaningless except when they manifest in behaviour which is public and thus verifiable.

This makes Ryle susceptible to the criticisms of verifications such as that the verification principle can’t verify itself.

Monism: The view that there is one kind of substance Materialism - The view that the one kind of substance is physical substance Aristotle rejected the idea of the world of forms and some non-physical aspect to the body like a soul which could have come from such a world. Aristotle believed in a posteriori evidence over a priori reasoning.

Aristotle’s understanding of the four causes showed that the soul was the formal cause of the body. He thought that our human essence of rational thought which makes us different from other things had to be determined by our formal cause. Aristotle made an analogy with a stamp imprint in some wax. The stamp has no actual positive existence separable from the wax, yet it nonetheless gives form to the wax. This is the relationship between the body and the soul for aristotle.

Strangely, Aristotle claimed that ‘rational thought’ can live on after death, causing many philosophers to claim he had contradicted himself. The question is in what sense rational thought lives on. Is it in the life and education we give to our children, the legacy of the actions and works we achieve in life? That doesn’t seem to break away from monism. However the idea of ‘rational thought living on’ seems more than that, hence the problem. It’s not clear what Aristotle means.

Aristotle thought the soul or ‘form’ of an axe depended on its purpose – chopping wood. The purpose of a human, Aristotle thought, was to think rationally, so our soul enables us to do that. This seems disproved by modern science which tells us our brain enables us to think rationally, not some soul or ‘form of the body’. Also, arguably there is no purpose to humans or anything else like axes. Axes can be used for anything, it’s subjective what purpose we

give to it. Although Aristotle is therefore a materialist, his conception of the physical as having purpose would be rejected by most modern materialists.

Materialism

Neuroscience – Sam Harris – damage parts of the brain and mental states/abilities are lost. Damage the whole brain at death and the whole mind is lost. That is the inference which our current evidence suggests.

David Chalmers distinguishes between the ‘easy problem of consciousness’, figuring out which part of the brain does what, and the ‘hard problem of consciousness’, which is how and why consciousness emerges from physical processes, which neuroscience has not come close to solving. Chalmers recognizes the progress of neuroscience at solving the easy problem of consciousness but thinks that its failure thus far to make any significant progress at solving the hard problem suggests that explaining consciousness will require discovery of something new which is radically different to anything we currently understand. This could be a dualist mental property, but Chalmers admits it could also be a materialist physical property or thing we’ve not yet discovered. Our physical universe, once fully understood, could be just as far beyond our current conception as we are beyond Aristotle’s.

There are many things science cannot currently make much or any progress on, such as dark matter. This doesn’t give us grounds for supposing something non-physical might exist.

Neuroscience is a young science and the brain is so incredibly complicated that it’s no surprise no progress has been made on the hard problem of consciousness.

Consider all the things in the past people thought science would never understand, e.g. the Sun, the origin of the universe, etc.

Hume argued that the body and mind work extremely closely together in every aspect of their existence so it’s reasonable to think that the death of one should mean the death of the other. Hume also argues that dreamless sleep involves the mind temporarily not existing. This entails the possibility of its permanent non-existence and therefore the mind cannot be an indestructible ever-lasting soul. Hume ultimately argued that the existence of this empirical evidence against the existence of the soul meant that the only way left to argue for it was special revelation from God, which he rejected as unempirical. Dawkins Argues that our genes are passed on when we die and that’s the only real sort of ‘life’ after death. That’s what science has evidence for, and it has no evidence for any other supernatural theory, therefore we shouldn’t believe in anything supernatural such as a soul. Dawkins also echoes Freud’s argument that religious people just believe because they are afraid of death.

Dawkins argued there are two types of soul – one valid the other invalid. Soul 1 is the view that the soul is a real thing separate from our body, which dawkins rejects due to lack of evidence. Soul 2 is the deep part of our mind and personality where the essence of our humanity is. Dawkins believes in soul 2.

Arguments based on observation

Teleological ArgumentTeleological – ‘telos’ or purpose

A Posteriori – knowledge through senses

Aquinas observed that things in the world moved towards a certain goal or purpose that was beyond their own ability to comprehend. Therefore ‘a designer’ is required to explain that.

Fifth Way – Design qua regularity:Premise 1 - Objects follow natural laws (purpose/function)Premise 2 - Objects follow efficiently because they were designed that wayPremise 3 - Everything that is designed must have a designerConclusion - Objects that don’t think are directed by things that do think (man & arrow)

- We call this thing God

Metaphor of archer and arrow: An arrow hits a target even though it isn’t sentient and cannot comprehend what it’s doing. There must be something which can comprehend the direction of the arrow: the archer (who is sentient) shot the arrow.

Similarly: Things in the natural world follow natural laws but are not sentient or not sentient enough in the case of animals, to dictate their own behaviour. Therefore, there must be an archer for the arrow of the universe, which must be a God.

J S Mill argues that the natural world is not suggestive of a designer because it is a bloodthirsty capricious mess. Mill thinks either there is no God or there is an immoral God. Dawkins adds to this the example of a digger wasp which lays its eggs in living creatures which are then eaten alive by the hatching larvae.

William Paley’s design qua Purpose points out in particular the complexity of the Human eye which is arranged to fulfil the purpose of enabling us to see. He also points to the wings of a bird and fins of a fish.

Watch analogy: If you had never seen anything man-made, and came across a watch, you couldn’t argue it had come about by chance nor been there forever because it has Complexity & Purpose. This must mean it had a designer – a watch maker. Paley then points out there are also things in the universe that are complex and have a purpose. Therefore, it follows that there must have been a universe maker which must have been God. “Every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature.”

What if the watch had faults or was broken, however, as the universe arguably is e.g. problem of evil.

Paley responds that even a broken watch must have a watch maker, and so too must it be with the universe.

Arguably Paley fails to prove the God of classical theism though, at least.

Hume’s unsound analogy argument – The universe is not like a machine (whereas the watch is) at all since it is composed of living things, it is more organic than it is mechanical. The world does not closely resemble something man-made, a house can be certainly concluded to have a designer, because we have seen it being built. We cannot infer from this that the universe has a similar

(intelligent) cause. Hume is claiming that we know artifacts are designed because we have seen them or heard of them being made. So, we know the watch is designed for a similar reason. This is in contrast to Paley who claims it’s the complexity and purpose that enables us to know it was designed.

Imagine an aboriginal who has never seen technology were to discover the watch. Would they know it was designed, despite having never heard of or seen one being made? If so, they arguably inferred its design from the complexity and purpose and so Paley seems right, if not, Hume seems right.

There might be some third reason why an aboriginal might realise a watch was designed, such as innate human appreciation for aesthetically mathematical mechanical intricacy due to our innate pattern seeking minds and preference for order over chaos.

Like effects don’t infer like causes (Hume). Just because two effects are alike, it doesn’t follow that their cause must be alike. So just because the effect of the watch and the effect of the universe are like each other in that they both have complexity and purpose, it doesn’t follow that the cause of the watch (a watch-maker) must be like the cause of a universe which Paley claims is a universe-maker. Two effects which are alike might in fact have very different causes. This is another criticism of analogy. Just because something is analogous to something else it doesn’t follow that they had analogous causes.

However, arguably Paley’s claim isn’t merely that the cause of the universe must be like the cause of the watch simply because the universe and the watch are similar effects. Paley’s claim is just that a designer is the best explanation of the cause of a complex and purposeful effect and that a God is the only sort of thing that could design and create a universe.

Hume could respond that we only think a designer is the best explanation of complexity and purpose because that is all we have ever observed, but we have no evidence that the creation of the universe was anything like what we commonly observe.

Arguably Paley’s point is that purpose must come from a mind. This is arguably a conceptual claim rather than an empirical one which depends on evidence.

Darwin’s theory of evolution by the process of natural selection showed that order in nature was not necessarily evidence of purpose and design.

Some Christians respond that evolution could simply be the mechanism by which God designed and created us. The strength of this argument is it accepts the evidence for evolution while still making room for God

Evolution provides us an explanation that doesn’t require God. We have evidence for that. But there’s no evidence that God did evolution. So maybe we have most reason to believe in evolution without God?

there is no evidence for God, but why would there be? Isn’t God outside of the empirical?

Tennent’s aesthetic principle: How can Darwinian evolution explain our perception of beauty? It doesn’t give us a survival advantage, yet it evolved. Only God’s interference can explain this.

Dawkins response: perception of beauty makes animals more attractive to their mate which results in more offspring, which is good for survival.

Counter: sexual attractiveness doesn’t seem to be all there is to beauty, what about music, literature, nature.

The evolution of the perception of beauty could simply be a bi-product of the evolution of intelligence

Design qua Regularity - Paley pointed to the rotations of planets in the solar system and how they obey the same universal laws as shown by Newton’s laws of motion and gravity. Paley argued that unless gravity consistently has strength it does within a narrow boundary then the planets would be unable to maintain their order and life on earth could not exist.

Similarly, why is the universe regular and not chaotic? This could not have come about by chance.Hume’s Epicurean hypothesis - This universe could just be a product of some cosmic accident, any universe is bound to have the appearance of design. A chaotic random universe, given an infinite amount of time, will by complete chance occasionally assemble itself into an orderly one. Not just once, but an infinite amount of times! In an infinite time frame, everything possible will happen, an infinite number of times.

Currently the view of science is that time began at the big bang however, therefore there has not been an infinite amount of time.

Perhaps there were infinite universes before ours or an infinite number of universes (multiverse theory).

Swinburne argues that modern discoveries of science provide evidence for a designer.

Swinburne claims that science tells us the what but not the why. Science can only discover the laws of nature but cannot tell us why there are laws. Science cannot even explain why the universe can even be understood by science at all.

The ‘fine tuning’ argument. If the laws of our universe, such as the charge of the election, were a tiny degree greater or lesser, life could not exist at all. Swinburne thinks it is unimaginably unlikely for such things to be exactly as they are by chance. Since science – the study of the natural - can’t answer these questions of why nature is the way it is, it must be something beyond the natural that is responsible for it being so – something that intentionally designed the world to be fine-tuned for life. God.

Swinburne argues that it’s unimaginably unlikely that fine tuning happened by chance. But this seems to assume that were it not for the efforts of a God, the ‘default’ state of nature would not be fine tuned. But how does he know that? I could claim that it’s unlikely to rain today because I have knowledge of the ‘default’ or ‘average’ state of the weather. But how does Swinburne know the ‘default’ state of a universe? It seems he thinks the universe that is created by chance does something like roll some dice to figure out what its laws will be, but that might not be how it works at all. No one knows!

Max Tegmark, a physicist, suggests 2 scientific explanations of fine tuning. 1 -The multiverse theory suggests our universe is just one of an infinite number of universes, all of which have different laws of physics. So the fact that some universes are so perfectly fine tuned for human existence doesn’t require any special explanation, since there are an infinite number of every possible configuration of universes.

However, there is very little evidence for the multiverse theory.

2 – Fecundity. There is no fine-tuning because intelligent life could arise in many forms in many different types of universes.

Cosmological ArgumentCosmological arguments argue for God’s existence as the explanation for the existence of the universe.

The Infinite regress is an important factor in the cosmological argument. If there is an infinite regress of objects going back in time forever, then the cosmological argument fails because there would have been no first cause or mover. Aquinas put forward this argument to try and show that an infinite regress was impossible:

If there is an infinite regress, then time has existed forever. So there must be an infinite amount of time before the present moment. That means that to get to the present moment, an infinite amount of time must have passed. However, an infinite amount of time cannot pass. No matter how long you wait, even if you never stop waiting, you will never actually reach infinity. Every second you add is finite and can never total an infinite number of seconds. So there cannot be an infinite amount of time before the present moment and therefore there cannot be an infinite regress.

This argument is hard to respond to without getting deep into the questions of what time actually is, whether it’s valid to think of it as composed of mathematical ‘amounts’ at all, whether time actually ‘passes’ or whether that’s an illusion of four dimensional beings such as ourselves.

William Lane Craig while arguing for the Kalam Cosmological argument argued that an infinite regress is impossible because infinities cannot exist in reality. He points out that if a library had an infinite number of books, half red half green, and you were to take the red books out of the library then you would have taken an infinite number of books out but there would still be an infinite number left. This is because infinity divided by two is still infinity. His claim is that this is just not how physical objects in reality could possibly function so it’s absurd to think infinities could exist. Therefore the infinite regress cannot exist.

The infinite library is an example of an infinite number of physical objects, but the infinite regress could be a finite number of physical objects existing over an infinite amount of time. Craig has shown the absurdity of physical infinities but not temporal ones, which is what the infinite regress involves.

Aquinas 1st Way – Unmoved Mover

Premise 1 - Everything is in a process of motionPremise 2 - Everything in motion (everything) is changing from a potential state to an actual statePremise 3 - Everything in a state of motion must have been caused by another thingPremise 4 - The chain of motion cannot go on infinitely into the past (otherwise = infinite regress)Conclusion - There must be a first mover which is unmoving = God

(Counter: false understanding of motion, Newton’s law of motion disproves it)

Aquinas 2nd Way – Uncaused Causer

Premise 1 - Nothing is an efficient cause of itself (nothing can create itself)Premise 2 - Everything has an efficient cause which follows a chain (1 causes 2, 2 causes 3)

Premise 3 - The chain of efficient cause cannot go back infinitely (or infinite regress/no explanation)Conclusion - There must be a first efficient cause which does not have an efficient cause = God

Hume’s view of causation is that cause and effect might not exist. He points out that humans think every event has a cause, but this may just be a misunderstanding. If we are being honest, whenever we think we see cause and effect we really only observe one event following another event. No matter how many times we observe a certain event following another event, such as a ball smashing a window when thrown at it, it is not giving us a valid reason to assume that there is any necessary connection between the events. Just because event B follows event A every time we observe it, it doesn’t mean that event A caused event B. Without the notion of causation, the cosmological argument fails.

Arguably modern science can provide us with evidence for cause and effect because we can now have a detailed understanding of how objects operate and interact and can therefore understand the causal mechanism sufficiently to conclude that the ball smashes the window because of our understanding of the chemistry of the brittleness of glass.

Hume and the fallacy of composition is that it’s a fallacy to assume that properties of the parts of something must be properties of the whole. In the case of the universe, Aquinas rightly points out that all the parts of the universe must have a cause. However it is the fallacy of composition to assume that therefore the universe itself as a whole must have had a cause. Bertrand Russell illustrated this by pointing out that just because every human has a mother, that doesn’t mean the human race has a mother. Note that Hume is not claiming to know that the universe had no cause. He is merely pointing out that it is invalid to argue from the parts of the universe having a cause to the universe itself having one. While the properties of the parts of something may indeed be the properties of the whole, that isn’t necessarily the case and it is the fallacy of composition to assume so.

Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason is rationalist a priori cosmological argument which arguably gets around the fallacy of composition because it’s not based on a posteriori observation of the parts of the universe having a cause. It states that everything must have a sufficient reason for its existence. Even if we can’t know or even find out what the reason is, there must be one. ‘From nothing, nothing comes’ because nothing is not sufficient to create something. Only a necessary being is sufficient to explain the universe because otherwise there would be an infinite chain of contingent beings, but: An infinite regress is not sufficient. The key part of Leibniz’s argument for the purposes of the cosmological argument is that the reason must be ‘sufficient’. Leibniz argues that if things have always existed going back forever (infinite regress) then nothing would have a sufficient reason for its existence. This is because everything’s reason for existence would consist something for which its reason for existence consists in something else. So a necessary being must have begun the chain of contingent beings and is the sufficient explanation of the universe.

Why must there be a reason for something’s existence? Isn’t this just a human desire for order that we project onto the world. Russell: says the universe could just be a brute fact, meaning there might be no reason for its existence. there could be an infinite regress of objects or even universes.

Copleston: Suggests making this argument is like sitting down at a chess board and claiming it’s a draw because you refuse to make a move. How can one do Philosophy if some things have no explanation?

Reality is not here to make sense to us.

Aquinas 3rd Way – Argument from Necessity

Premise 1.1 - Everything in the universe exists contingently (once didn’t and won’t exist in the future)Premise 1.2 - If everything exists contingently, then at one point, nothing must have existedPremise 1.3 - If at one point nothing existed, then nothing would exist now (nothing comes from nothing)Conclusion 1 - There must be something that exists necessarily – that thing we call God

Russell: Necessary existence is not a thing. This builds on Kant’s criticism of the ontological argument that existence is not a predicate. Russell claims that only propositions can be necessary, not things. So no object is necessary or contingent – it simply exists or doesn’t exist

Copleston: Argues that ‘necessary being’ and ‘cause of the universe’ are meaningful terms, ordinary people understand what they mean.

Laurence Krauss, a physicist, argues that the universe came from nothing because it actually is nothing. Gravity has negative energy which exactly cancels out the positive energy of matter, so the total energy of the universe is zero; it is nothing. Krauss claims this answers Leibniz’ question of why there is something rather than nothing. Quantum mechanics has existed eternally and causes quantum fluctuations which can create a zero-energy universe from nothing because such a universe requires zero energy to create.

Craig argues that Krauss’ definition of nothing is faulty since it’s actually something. Nothing really means total absence of anything.

Arguably the definition of nothing philosophers have traditionally used is in fact not what nothing actually is though. Science has proven the philosophical conception of nothing to be inaccurate.

Arguments based on reason

Ontological argument

A priori (without experience – based on Logic instead)Deductive (If the premises are true, the conclusion must be true)

Anselm refers to Psalm 14:1 ‘the fool says in his heart, ‘there is no god’.” When the fool can conceive of God (the greatest thing), it would be contradictory to suppose God doesn’t exist. As existence in reality is an intrinsic quality of greatness (by definition). To say there’s no God is simply to misunderstand what the word ‘God’ means.

Premise 1 - God is the greatest conceivable beingPremise 2 - It is greater to exist in reality than the mind alonePremise 3 - God exists in the mindConclusion - Therefore God exists in reality

Gaunilo makes the point that if we apply Anselm’s logic to something other than God like an

Island, we get an ‘absurd’ outcome (reductio ad absurdum) We can conceive of a perfect Island but that doesn’t mean it exists, so why should that be the case for God?

Anselm’s 2nd version of the ontological argument. Anselm thought Gaunilo had a point, so strengthened his argument into a 2nd form.

Contingent – depends on something else for its existenceNecessary – does not depend on anything for its existence – contains the reason for its existence within itself – cannot be denied without contradiction

Something is greater if it doesn’t depend on anything for it’s existence. An Island depends on things such as the ocean etc to exist. Therefore an Island is contingent whereas God is necessary. That’s why the argument works for God but not an Island.

Descartes Ontological Argument: God is a supremely perfect being A supremely perfect being contains all perfections Existence is a perfection God exists

Descartes said that the relationship between God and existence was like that of a triangle with the property of ‘having three sides’ or a mountain and a valley. It is part of the definition of those things that they are together.

Kant argued that existence was not a predicate, meaning not an attribute, but the pre-condition for having attributes.

Imagine you did not believe in mermaids but argued with someone who did about whether they exist. You would be agreeing on the definition of the concept of what it meant to be a mermaid (half fish, half human etc) but disagreeing on whether that concept is instantiated (exists) in reality. If you can agree on the concept but disagree about existence, then it seems that the existence status can vary while the concept is held the same, suggesting that existence and the concept of a thing are separable and thus independent.

Kant illustrated this with 100 thalers, which are coins. Imagine you have 100 coins in your mind as a mere concept. Then imagine you have 100 coins in existence, not in the mind alone. The coins in existence have existence, the concept of coins in your mind does not.

Kant argues that the concept of what it means to be 100 coins is no different whether it is a mere concept in your mind or whether that concept actually manifests in reality as an existing thing. 100 coins is just 100 coins, whether in your mind or reality.

If there is no difference in the concept of what it means to be 100 coins between whether it is in the mind alone or in reality then it makes no difference to the concept of a thing whether it has

existence or not, which means that existence cannot be part of the concept of a thing, so means it cannot be an attribute or predicate.

Malcolm argued that Kant’s argument only worked for contingent existence but not necessary existence, so Anselm’s second version of the argument was right. Something is contingent if it is dependent on something else for its existence. The reason for its existence is external to it. However a necessary being doesn’t depend on anything else and so contains the reason for its existence within itself. This reason is the logical impossibility of non-existence. Since that is contained within itself in a way that contingent existence is not, Necessary existence can therefore be a part of a thing in a way that contingent existence can’t.

Existence is not a perfection/greatness is Malcolm’s objection that Anselm and Descartes were wrong to claim that it is ‘greater’ or ‘more perfect’. Why is it ‘greater’ to exist in reality than in the mind? Isn’t ‘greatness’ subjective? Isn’t it merely the subjective preference of humans to exist?

Why it is greater to be necessary than contingent? Anselm clearly thinks it is greater to be unable to fail to exist. A contingent being can fail to exist, therefore it’s lesser, for Anselm. However, that assumes that existence or inability to fail to exist is greater than an ability to fail to exist, which still operates on the same assumption that existence is greater than non-existence. Why?

Malcolm claims to get around this objection by removing the claim that existence is a greater or more perfect than non-existence, which he claims is a ‘remarkably queer’ idea. Malcolm’s Ontological argument the runs as follows:

1 God either exists or does not exist2 God cannot come into existence nor go out of existence as that would be a limitation3 So If God exists, God cannot cease to exist4 Therefore if God exists, God cannot fail to exist = necessary5 But if Goes doesn’t exist, he can’t come into existence (as that would make him dependent on whatever caused that which would make him contingent therefore limited)6 Therefore If God does not exist, God’s existence is impossible7 God’s existence is either necessary or impossible8 The concept of God is not self-contradictory (like a four-sided triangle), therefore God’s existence is not impossible 9 Therefore God exists necessarily

Hume

1 – Whatever we can conceive of as existing, we can conceive of as not existing. Therefore, the claim that God does not exist cannot be a contradiction, which it would be were Anselm/Descartes right that ‘God exists’ is an analytic truth.

This argument seems to rely on conceivability entailing possibility. The masked man fallacy suggests it does not.

2 – Hume’s fork – Hume claims that there are two types of knowledge and two corresponding methods by which such knowledge is arrived at:

Analytic truths are relations of ideas which is arrived at a priori Synthetic truths are matters of fact which are arrived at a posteriori

Analytic truths are about mathematical and logical propositions which Hume argues are distinct from matters of fact because no matter what matter of fact was the case, a priori truths would be unchanged. Hume simply rejects the idea that we can arrive at a matter of fact (such as claims about what exists, like ‘God exists’) by means a priori.

Maybe pure mathematics can establish matters of fact if the universe simply ‘is maths’ in some respect, which many physicists claim.)

The mathematics of the universe would be valid mathematically whether it happened to describe actual reality or not, so arguably it is still distinct from matters of fact.

Religious experienceWilliam James was a philosopher and a psychologist. In his book ‘The varieties of religious experience’ James presents a number of first-hand case studies of religious experiences. James argued that religious experiences were the core of religion, whereas religious teachings and practices were ‘second hand’ religion, i.e not what religion is really about. This makes the argument from religious experience centrally important, though it means James doesn’t exactly believe in ‘God’ in the traditional sense. James thinks all religions are true in that they point to a higher spiritual reality.

It could be argued that these first hand experiences are examples of psychological disorders, brain hallucinations, fasting, epilepsy, etc.

But James saw them as central to understanding religion. He could respond that religious experiences are often not random hallucinations but deeply emotionally meaningful and profound experiences. Why should that be the case? Why should a random brain hallucination have such life changing effects? James thinks the more plausible explanation is that they really are tapping into a higher spiritual reality.

James viewed conversion experiences as a transformation from a divided or imperfect self (unhappy, conscious of being wrong) to a more unified consciousness (happy, knows right).

Consider the case of St Paul, is James right to say Paul was unhappy and conscious of being wrong while persecuting and killing Christians before his conversion experience?In defence of James, perhaps Paul was secretly unhappy with his persecutory actions.

James believes religious experiences indicated the probability of God, though not completely proving God. Since James was a pluralist who thought all religions were different cultural manifestations of the divine, he didn’t exactly think religious experiences pointed to ‘God’ but to the ‘spiritual’ or ‘higher aspects’ of humanity. Different religions on different sides of the earth have similarities, which to James suggest there must be an objective higher spiritual reality which they all partake in.

Arguably it is simply that all humans have a similar psychology and similar concerns e.g life & death which accounts for the similarities in religions.

James was most interested in the effects religious experiences had on people’s lives and argued that the validity of the experience depended upon those effects. This is because James was a Pragmatist – a philosophical view on epistemology which states that if something is good for us, that is evidence of its truth. James pointed to the case study of an Alcoholic who was unable to give up alcohol but then had a religious experience, after which he was able to give up the alcohol. They were unable to give up the alcohol before the experience, implying they lacked the power. After the experience, they had gained that power they lacked before. Where did it come from? James would argue that this is evidence for the validity of the experience, meaning it was probably ‘true’. Though again,

James would only think this was evidence for the validity of ‘the spiritual’, not necessarily whichever God that alcoholic happened to believe in.

However arguably just because something is good for us or bad for us, that is no evidence for its truth or falsity. I could easily invent a religion which was psychologically satisfying and encouraged people to act well, and some might even have religious experiences in that religion, however it would all be made up.

James would respond that although the details particular to that religion were made up, nonetheless the details of any religion are ‘second hand’ to the experiences, which allow any human, whatever they believe, to tap into ‘the spiritual’

Isn’t Pragmatism essentially going by the logic that if, for example, nuclear bombs are very destructive and bad for us, then the science behind them must be false? That is absurd but it seems to be the logic of Pragmatism.

James argues for God in very general terms – religious experience pointing to a higher order of reality.

Perhaps this ‘higher order’ of reality is merely in our minds. It may be a valid spiritual potential of human conscious experience, but it may be purely psychological and have no supernatural element whatsoever.

James might be able to accept this conclusion however. His main aim is to prevent religion from being dismissed as meaningless superstition. It has a very important psychological function and use that we must acknowledge. However when it comes to the argument for religious experience, it’s arguably hard to see how this could leave us arguing for anything supernatural.

William James gives four criteria which characterise all religious experiences: Ineffable – the experience is beyond language and cannot be put into words to accurately

described. Noetic – some sort of knowledge or insight is gained Transient – the experience is temporary Passive – the experience happens to a person, the person doesn’t make the experience

happen.Arguably not all religious experiences are transient – some claim every moment of very day is a religious experience. Also, there seems to be a contradiction between Noetic and ineffable. How can we gain some sort of knowledge or insight which cannot be put into words?

Rudolf Otto. Numinous experiences are feelings of awe and wonder in the presence of an almighty and transcendent God.

Otto claims Numinous experiences are the core of any religion ‘worthy of the name’. So Otto is sort of a pluralist (someone who think all religions can be true) but he rejects as truly religious any religion that does not have Numinous experiences at their core. For Otto, it is fundamental to true religion that individuals should have a sense of a personal encounter with the divine. This means that Numinous religious experiences are the true core of religion, whereas the teachings and holy books and so on are not the true core of a religion.

Otto was a protestant who clearly advanced religious experiences as a direct line to God in opposition to the Catholic view that the church was a necessary intermediary between common people and God. Otto tried to identify what made an experience religious rather than just an experience. Otto described the numinous experience as follows:

It is an experience of something ‘Wholly other’ – completely different to anything human.The revelation of God is felt emotionally, not rationally.

Mysterium – the utter inexplicable indescribable mystery of the experienceTremendum – the awe and fear of being in the presence of an overwhelmingly superior beingFascinans – despite that fear, being strangely drawn to the experience

Otto rejected the idea that God could be known through logical argument or sensory experiences.It’s not clear whether we gain knowledge of God through experience, since the experience is emotional rather than rational.

Otto claims the theological ideas of different religions come after the experience. However it seems more correct to say that people see the God they believe in as a result of their social conditioning.

There are many religious experiences which are not numinous. E.g seeing an Angel

It also seems difficult for Otto to rule out alternative naturalistic explanations of religious experience such as Mental illness, Epilepsy, random brain hallucinations, drugs, alcohol, fasting, sleep deprivation, etc.

Otto could respond with the question of why such deep important life changing and defining experiences should so consistently result from such naturalistic things? It’s one thing to have a bizarre random hallucination, it’s another to have one that feels like you’re connecting to an ultimate spiritual reality where there is a being. Naturalistic explanations do explain why we have hallucinatory delusory experiences, but it can’t really explain why they are of such deep profundity and spiritual significance.

Swinburne argued for the principles of testimony and credulity. The principle of credulity argues that you should believe what you experience unless you have a reason not to. The principle of testimony argues that you should believe what others tell you they have experienced, unless you have a reason not to.Swinburne is an empiricist who argued that an experience of God should count as evidence towards belief in God, although it doesn’t constitute complete proof. Swinburne argued that whenever we gain some new evidence, we can’t dismiss it for no reason – that would be irrational. It is only if we have other better-established evidence which contradicts that new evidence that we may rationally dismiss it. This is the rationale behind the principles of testimony and credulity. Experiencing God is evidence for God, unless we have some other evidence to justify dismissing the experiences.

However, is a mere experience of God sufficient evidence to justify belief in God? Arguably the existence of God is a extraordinary claim which therefore might require extraordinary evidence.

Any religious experience could be explained by mental illness, epilepsy, random brain hallucinations, fasting, drugs, alcohol, lack of sleep, etc. So we will always have a reason not to believe any religious experience.

Freud called religion an 'obsessional neurosis' and said it ultimately derived from two main psychological forces. The first is the fear of death. We have an instinctual animalistic fear of death which we can't control but we can control our human thoughts and cognitions. While animals only have their fear of death triggered when in a dangerous situation, humans are the only animal that constantly are aware that they are going to die. We have the animalsitic part of ourselves, but have since developed cognitive processes, which then unfortunately constantly trigger the fear of death

on our anaimalstic side. So the solution is to manipulate those to believe that death is not the end. Also Freud argued that the reason Christians call God 'father' is because they have a desire to be a child forever. It's a desire for eternal innocence in the face of the painful reality of the world. Freud thought these psychological forces were so strong that they resulted in delusions which could explain religious experience.

Calling religion a neurosis is quite extreme. There seem to be plenty of non-neurotic religious people. The problem with psychological arguments is that while they could be true for many maybe even the majority, it's hard to argue they are true for all and even if they don't work for one person, that's one person they can't explain.

Freud is curently regarded by psychologists as being too unempiricial in his methods to count as real science.

Popper argued that Freud's method was unfalsifiable. What could Freud point to that would prove his view wrong? It's hard to see, but therefore this is not true falsifiable science.

William James rejected psychological attempts to explain away religious experiences as coming from a prejudice against religion. So James counters psychological explanations with their own psychological explanation.

Persinger was a neuroscientist who created a machine dubbed the ‘God helmet’ which manipulated people’s brain waves and often caused them to have a religious experience where they felt the presence of unseen beings. If this is the case, arguably religious experiences originate from the brain, not God.

However, maybe that brain manipulation is simply the mechanism by which God creates religious experience. Also, we know we can cause hallucinations by manipulating the brain with drugs like LSD. This shouldn’t necessarily count against the validity of religious experiences that occur without such manipulations.

Arguably Persinger at least proves that religious experiences could have a naturalistic explanation, which suggests it’s up to religious believers to prove that they have a supernatural explanation at that point.

Visions & Voices. St Theresa of Avila said she had seen the holiness of God and ‘it was blue’. She worried whether her vision was real, however. She claimed we can judge a religious experience as real and valid only if it is in accordance with the general church teachings. That’s how we can rule out it possibly being the devil. St Berdenette had a vision of mary in a dream who told her to dig in a certain place, where she then found a stream. This has become a popular site for people who believe that bathing in this stream will heal them. An example of just a voice experience would be God speaking at Jesus’s baptism.

Vision and voices could be criticised with the standard arguments from science eg random brain hallucinations, hypogogic (between waking and sleeping) hallucinations, drugs, alcohol, fasting, mental illnesses like Epilepsy or schizophrenia, wishful thinking.

Corporate religious experience is when multiple people share the same experience. Eg Toronto Blessing or speaking in tongues (Pentecostalism). In the toronto blessing, the congregation felt unusual emotions, some falling around crying, others laughing hysterically. They attributed this to the presence of the holy spirt, which they claimed to feel. The strengths of corporate is that it can’t be explained by criticisms that could only apply to individuals – like mental illness, drugs, alcohol, fasting, or attention seeking.

However there are other explanations. In the case of speaking in tongues, arguably it is a learned social behaviour resulting from extreme adrenaline rushes where people simply lose control of themselves yet interpret this as the holy spirit acting through them.

Also, there are peculiar psychological dynamics to crowds of people such as mob mentality, mass hysteria and social conformity. In the middle ages, an entire village would form an angry mob who were all convinced they had seen a witch cast a spell, and would then execute some poor woman. We could even say the same of today regarding groups of people who think they have seen Aliens. So clearly group delusion is possible. This could then be claimed to be the case in corporate religious experience.

Conversion experiences. St Paul on the road to Damascus saw Jesus and was converted from a persecutor of christianity to a Christian. The strength of Conversion experiences is that they can’t be explained away as wishful thinking or a fear of death, since Paul would have already satisfied those since he already belived in a God. However arguably it could still be explained by mental illness. Much of Paul’s description of his experience – eg seeing a bright light, falling to the floor, being paralysed, are symptoms of epileptic siezures.

It is hard to diagnose people based on writings from thousands of years ago though. Conversion could also be explained away by wishful thinking if the person’s previous belief was somehow unsatisfying. However it’s hard to argue this is the case with Paul, unless his killings were startling to weigh on his conscience.

The problem of evilEpicurus (ancient Greek philosopher, one of the first to oppose the problem of evil)

1. Is God willing but not able to prevent evil? Then he isn’t omnipotent2. Is God is able to prevent evil but not willing? Then he isn’t omnibenevolent3. If God is both able and willing, then why is there evil?4. If God is neither able or willing then why call him God?

Mackie reformulated this argument into the ‘inconsistent triad’ which argued that God’s omnipotence, God’s omnibenevolence & Evil cannot all exist together. One of them has to be false. Since Evil seems to exist, this casts doubt on God being all loving or all powerful. Mackie’s view is known as the Logical problem of evil as it says it is logically impossible for both God (as defined with omnipotence & omnibenevolence) and evil to both exist. Alternatively others argue for the Evidential problem of evil which argues that God and evil could logically exist together, however the existence of evil makes it less likely.

The Logical problem of evil is the claim that evil and the God of classical theism (as defined as omnibenevolent, omnipotent and omniscient) cannot exist together. In other words, there is no possible world in which both evil and the God of classical theism exist. Their co-existence is impossible. Mackie argued for this.

The Evidential problem of evil is the claim that an imperfect world, due to the existence of evil, is better evidence for an imperfect or non-existent God than a perfect one. It is possible that evil and a perfect God exist together however it is more likely that they don’t and therefore we have most

reason to believe that they don’t and that therefore the God of classical theism does not exist. Hume argued for this.

Hume echoes Epicurus’s ‘old questions’ – the logical problem of evil - which he thinks have not been adequately responded to.

Hume also considers the evidential problem of evil. Hume argues that the theodicies which attempt to respond to the problem of evil by claiming that God and evil could ‘possibly’ exist together, due to some speculation about God’s motives to punish (Augustine) or develop us (iraneaus) fail to really respond to the problem of evil. Hume is saying that it’s easy to make up some story about God’s motivation, but that such stories are mere constructed possibilities, not sufficiently evidenced views that warrant belief by an empiricist.

For Hume, those who put forward theodicies seem to feel they have a licence to come up with any logically possible state of affairs as regards God’s will, to explain the problem of evil. That is not a sufficient way to respond to the problem of evil for an empiricist like Hume, who thinks that we should only believe what we have evidence for. The fact that the theodicies invented by Augustine and Irenaeus are possible ways that God and evil could co-exist is insufficient as they do not establish that they are in fact true.

‘I … allow, that the bad appearances, notwithstanding all my reasonings, may be compatible with such attributes as you suppose: But surely they can never prove these attributes’

To really solve the problem of evil, Hume thinks, the theist must not merely come up with some logically possible scenario in which evil and God co-exist, the theist must establish how they can infer God’s infinite power and goodness from what we experience which amounts only to a finite mixture of good and evil.

Hume puts forward four categories of evil he thinks are unnecessary and would be avoidable by a God:

1 – Animal suffering. Why shouldn’t nature be created such that animals feel less pain, or indeed no pain at all?

2 – Creatures have limited abilities to ensure their survival and happiness

3 – Why does nature have extremes which make survival and happiness more difficult? Natural evil

4 – Why doesn’t God intervene to prevent individual natural disasters?

Since it would have been so easy for a God to make things better than they in fact are, this is evidence against the likelihood of such a God existing. Hume says it is ‘possible’ there are good reasons why a God doesn’t stop these things from happening ‘but they are unknown to us’. Since they are unknown to us, we are not justified in drawing conclusions about reality from them.

Hume thinks that the evidence suggests that the cause of the universe, whatever that may be, is just as uncaring and indifferent to preferring goodness over evil as it is to preferring heat over cold.

Augustine’s Theodicy Interpreted Genesis story Literally

Fallen angels cause natural evil. The exercise of free will by humans causes moral evil

The garden of Eden was a perfect place. Adam and Eve disobeyed God and as a punishment were banished to this earth often called a ‘fallen world’. This episode is referred to as ‘the fall’. After their sin, God said Eve will now have pain in childbirth and Adam would have to ‘toil’ the land to make food.

Augustine argued every descendant of Adam and Eve – all humans – were ‘seminally present’ in the ‘loins of Adam’, which means that we all deserve this punishment of living in a fallen world.

“All evil is either sin or a punishment for sin” – Augustine

God is not responsible for evil as it resulted from the free will of angels and humans. Therefore, it doesn’t conflict with God’s omni-qualities, and so the triad is not inconsistent.

Augustine argued Evil does not actually exist. It is merely a privation of good, meaning it is the absence of Good. As humans fell away from God, we fell away from his goodness, resulting in what we mistakenly call ‘evil’. Evil has no ‘positive existence’, only a negative one. E.g. darkness does not actually exist, it’s merely the absence of light. Darkness is not a ‘thing’ but our minds trick us into thinking it is.

Science – evolution & geology shows there was no garden of Eden. Therefore, the story on which Augustine bases his argument isn’t true.

Moral – It’s not ethical for all humanity to be blamed for the actions of Adam and Eve. This suggests an indefensible view of moral responsibility – that people can be responsible for actions committed by others which is of special absurdity in this case since the action occurred before they were even born.

Augustine is not actually saying that God himself blamed all humanity for Adam’s sin however, he’s merely pointing out that it was a factual consequence of Adam’s sin that all future humanity in its seminal nature in Adam’s loins became infected with original sin because of his action. It’s not God’s fault, it’s Adams’.

Arguably it would still be God’s fault however, because surely God created the natural laws by which procreation operates. If Augustine’s assumptions about how they work are correct then God for some reason designed human procreation to allow the inheritance of original sin. Why would God do that? Therefore, God must be judging it good for a child to suffer negative consequences as a result of the actions of his parents. An omnibenevolent God would not do that, therefore he would not design procreation to pass on original sin.

Both this scientific and moral criticism could be defended against by adopting a symbolic interpretation of the genesis story rather than a literal one. We could still reach Augustine’s conclusions

Augustine would have to say that it is ‘justice’ for a child to get cancer and that God is still omnibenevolent despite allowing it.

Schleiermacher argued that a truly perfect world cannot go wrong. A truly perfect world cannot contain within it the capacity for it to go wrong, whether by the free choices of humans or otherwise. Since the world did go wrong, either it was not perfect or God enabled it to go wrong

himself. If something is perfect, then it can’t go wrong. If something goes wrong it means it had the potential to go wrong. If something has the potential to go wrong, then it isn’t perfect. Is it really justice for a child to die of cancer?

Augustine & the logical problem. If the scenario Augustine describes is logically possible then he has solved the logical problem of evil. The argument from science at most proves that his theodicy is false, not logically impossible. The moral argument, however, could be used to argue that it is logically impossible for a perfect God to set up a world which would result in original sin being passed down to all humans. That could show Augustine fails to respond to the logical problem.

Augustine & the evidential problem. Whether Augustine’s theodicy is logically possible is of no relevance to the evidential problem. The scientific argument however shows that there is no evidence for the fall but evidence for evolution, suggesting Augustine’s theodicy fails to respond to the evidential problem.

Irenaeus’ Theodicy like Augustine’s, took Biblical fall of Adam and literally.

Instead of viewing the fall as negative, Irenaeus views it as a necessary stage in the development of humans towards perfection. Adam and Eve are like children who go astray because they lack sufficient wisdom to do what is right. Punishment is a way to help children mature.

On the basis of the quote from Genesis ‘God made humans in his image and likeness’, Irenaeus made a distinction between man being made in: the image of God verses the likeness of God. An image is when you look like something on the surface, whereas a likeness is when you actually are like something.

Creation has two steps for Irenaeus – firstly being made in God’s image where we have only a potential for good due to spiritual immaturity. Step two is where we achieve God’s likeness by choosing good over evil which enables us to grow spiritually and morally.

This raises the question of why didn’t God just make us good to begin with? Why bother with the first step, why not create us good?

Irenaeus answered that creating us fully developed was impossible. A fully developed soul is one which has chosen good over evil. If God made us fully developed, then he would be making us choose good over evil. But if you make someone do something, then they didn’t really choose it. Being fully developed requires having made a choice, therefore it’s logically impossible to make someone fully developed. God had to make us undeveloped and allow us the freedom to choose good over evil.

God could have created us with no free will like robots and then he could have controlled us so that there was no moral evil. Wouldn’t that have been better? Consider all of the harms that humans do to one another such as genocides. Is having free will really worth suffering such things?

Plantinga answered ‘yes’ in his ‘free will defense’ against the problem of evil. He argued that having free will is worth the suffering that comes with it as a result of its misuse because creatures that are free are the only things that actually have any value in the first place such that they can even be worth something. A robot cannot be praised nor blamed for what it does as it is just following its programming, so therefore nothing a robot does is worth anything. It’s not that a universe of robots would be of less

value than a universe of creatures will free will like humans, it’s that a universe composed of robots would be without value and so purposeless.

A biblical example of this Iraneaus pointed to is Jonah and Whale: Jonah disobeyed God and then the natural evil of a storm and a big fish who ate him and spat him out days later helped Jonah learn his lesson. The idea of ‘soul making’ is very close to ‘character development’ in literature or film. By going through harsh struggles, a character becomes stronger and learns more. So evil serves a good purpose.

But isn’t some evil so bad that it is soul breaking? Can’t some evil destroy a person’s character rather than build it up and develop it? Some people are crushed into depression or post-traumatic stress disorder when they experience evil.

It could be responded that they failed to rise to the challenge of the evil.

What about cases where evil doesn’t lead to any good? A child with cancer who dies, for example.

Some Christians respond that God is teaching a lesson to the parents in such cases.That seems unfair to the Child however, and furthermore what if the child Has no parents?

We could agree with Irenaeus that encountering and overcoming evil leads to good character development. But couldn’t we do just as well in that regard with a little less evil? Couldn’t we grow just as much with 0.1% less evil in the world? Well then that’s 0.1% of evil that Hick & Irenaeus can’t explain.

Irenaeus & the logical problem. For Irenaeus the problem of evil is solved by pointing out that evil is needed in order to give us the opportunity to choose good over it so that we can develop our souls to be more in God’s likeness such that we are deserving of heaven. If this is logically possible then Irenaeus has solved the logical problem of evil.

Irenaeus & the evidential problem. Irenaeus might be considered to solve the evidential problem of evil because it states that the world is imperfect due to being a mixture of good and evil and therefore we cannot infer the existence of a perfect God from it.

However, if Irenaeus is correct the evil serves a good purpose then he would be asking us to reevaluate the inherent assumption of the evidential problem that evil is bad. If in fact it serves a good purpose, then it could be justifiably considered as evidence on the basis of which a perfect God could be inferred.

However, this depends on the evidence in favor of Iranaeus’ claim that all evil serves the purpose of the good. If there is some evil which does not serve the good, then his response to the evidential problem of evil would also fall down.

John Hick’s - Modern Irenaean Theodicy Argued that human beings were not created perfect but develop in two stages:

Stage 1: Spiritually immature: through struggle to survive and evolve, humans can develop into spiritually mature beings.The fall is a result of immature humans who are only in the image of God.

Stage 2: Grow into a relationship with God

Hick argued for the Epistemic distance. This means that we cannot truly know of God’s existence. If God did make himself known to us, we would follow his commands out of obedience to his authority instead of following them because we had figured out that they were the right thing to do. Hick argued that it’s only if we have faith in God and still do good because we want to do good, rather than because we know for sure there’s a God who wants us to, that we can truly grow spiritually and morally. Peter Vardy illustrated this with the example of a peasant girl who a King falls in love with and forces her to marry him. The girl doesn’t really love the King and only does it due to obedience to authority out of fear. Similarly, if God appeared to us we would obey his authority rather than really loving what is good for its own sake, which is the morally superior move and therefore most conducive of soul making.

Arguably religious experience is God revealing himself to a person however, therefore Hick’s epistemic distance theory is inconsistent with religious experience.

The epistemic distance does provide a reason why there would be no evidence for a perfect God, but it itself has no evidence for it and so the evidential problem of evil would remain.

According to Hick everyone will be saved since a loving God would not send people to heaven – universal salvation but post-mortem soul making is needed

(Irenaeus: believed in Hell & rejected universal salvation)

Hick on the logical problem: Same as Irenaeus

Hick on the evidential problem: The epistemic distance can be seen as a response to the evidential problem of evil since it suggests there is a reason for the lack of evidence for God’s existence.

However there is no evidence for the epistemic distance, it’s merely a logical possibility and so would solve the logical but not the evidential problem.

The nature or attributes of GodOmnipotence.

Descartes argued that the definition of omnipotence included the ability to do the logically impossible. Descartes argued that logic was a human limitation but not a limitation for God. Therefore God could create or encompass a contradiction without it detracting from his perfection. God could therefore create a four-sided triangle. Emanation.

Is logic really just a human limitation? Can God exist outside logic? Is logic the sort of thing something could either be in or not?

Presumably God created logic along with the world, therefore it could make sense for him to be outside of it

Perhaps God didn’t create logic though. Logic could be the type of thing which isn’t created – it simply ‘is’, in some sense.

Mackie argued that ‘logically impossible actions’ are just ‘words which fail to describe any state of affairs’. So Logical impossibilities do not exist.

Arguably the only reason they cannot exist is because it would be logically impossible for them to do so, which if Descartes’ is right is not a limitation om God’s ability to create them. While logically impossible things cannot be done, nonetheless

if God can do the logically impossible then he can do what can’t be done. Logical impossibilities indeed cannot exist, but that doesn’t mean God cannot make them exist.

Aquinas argued that the definition of omnipotence was the ability to do any logically possible thing. Therefore, God can’t make a triangle with four sides. However, this would not limit his omnipotence if we use Aquinas’s definition, since creating a four sided triangle is logically impossible. Aquinas argued that the reason God could not do the logically impossible is that it would involve God encompassing a contradiction within himself (since it is a contradiction for a triangle to have four sides, for example). This would detract from his perfection, since contradictions are imperfect. Yet God cannot be imperfect, therefore he cannot allow a contradiction, therefore he cannot do the logically impossible.

Is it really imperfect to create a contradiction?

The paradox of the stone is the question of whether God could create a stone so heavy he can’t lift it. This is problematic for omnipotence because if God can create the stone, there is something he cannot do – lift the stone. If he can’t make the stone, there is something he cannot do – make the stone. It looks like Aquinas’ definition of omnipotence struggles to address this. It’s easy for Aquinas to dismiss whether God can create four sided triangles as that would be logically impossible. Creating a really heavy stone doesn’t seem like a logically impossible task though, so surely God should be capable of doing it. In that case, he cannot lift the stone though, which equally doesn’t seem like a logically impossible task. So, there is some logically possible action which God cannot do, thus invalidating Aquinas’ definition of omnipotence as being capable of doing all logically possible actions. Descartes doesn’t have this problem because he would claim that God can create a stone too heavy for him to lift and then he can also lift it. That is a logically impossible solution, but that’s no issue for Descartes’ view of omnipotence.

Mavrodes backs up Aquinas here by arguing that in fact the stone is logically self-contradictory if we notice the full context. It’s not just a really heavy stone – it is a stone ‘too heavy for an omnipotent being to lift’. Since by definition an omnipotent being could lift any stone, there is no such thing as a stone too heavy for an omnipotent being to lift, and thus it is in fact a logically impossible thing, just like a four-sided triangle. Therefore, the answer to the paradox is that God cannot create the stone and the reason is that it is logically impossible, but that doesn’t detract from God’s omnipotence according to Aquinas’s definition which is therefore still valid. So, Aquinas would say God can’t make the stone but that’s because it can’t be done, just like making a square circle.

Self-imposed limitation is a third way of resolving issues regarding omnipotence. The idea is that when God created the universe, he made it logically consistent and orderly. This meant that if he did something logically impossible within the universe, that would disrupt the universe and make it chaotic. Since God does not want to do that to his creation or to humans, he must have limited his ability to do logically impossible things within the universe. This explains why God’s omnipotence is limited, but only within the universe and only by his own choice, thus making him ultimately not ‘really’ limited. This is attempting to have the benefit of Descartes’ view that logic cannot be above God while also maintaining the logical integrity of the universe in which there are simply things which cannot be done.

Does it really make logical sense for an omnipotent being to be capable of limiting itself? Arguably genuine limitation requires actual inability and inability to throw off or discard that limitation. Yet in that case, it seems God would be reducing the number of things he could do, so he wouldn’t be able to do everything he previously could, making him not omnipotent. The fact that God chose to limit himself still makes him limited and thus not omnipotent.

If Descartes’ view is right, it seems God could both perform a logical impossibility within the universe and avoid disrupting the order and logic of the universe. Even if that is logically impossible to do, God could do it because God can do the logically impossible, on Descartes’ view.

Even if Descartes is wrong, it’s not obvious why doing something logically impossible within the universe should cause the whole of creation to become chaotic.

Omnibenevolence & Omniscience on the issue of Free Will & God’s divine foreknowledge:Boethius grappled with the question of the consequences of divine foreknowledge – the idea that God knows what we are going to do before we do it. If he does, how can we have free will? Boethius thought this needed solving because if we don’t have free will, then how can God judge us fairly, sending us to heaven or hell. This would seem to question his omnibenevolence.

Boethius’ solution was to argue that God is eternal – outside of time. This being the case, he sees all time (past, present and future) simultaneously in the ‘eternal present’. This means that god does not have divine foreknowledge as there is no past, present or future for God – that is just the human perspective on time. God’s eternal omniscience does not interfere with our free will – he simply sees the results of our free choices in the eternal present, they are not in any way determined. So Boethius saves God’s omnibenevolence from the criticism that divine foreknowledge would determine our actions making him unjustified in rewarding or punishing us for them. God’s knowledge is not ‘foreknowledge’ – it does not exist ‘prior’ to our action as it exists outside of time.

However, while God’s knowledge may not determine our choices, nonetheless it still seems like the results of our choices are fixed and inevitable. Surely we cannot do anything other than what God knows we will in fact do. Therefore we don’t have the ability to do otherwise, and so how can we have free will?

Boethius responded to this challenge by distinguishing between simple and conditional necessity. He agreed that God knowing our future actions made our actions necessary – but only conditionally necessary. He likened this to someone observing someone else walking. The fact that the observed person is walking is clearly made necessary by the observer knowing that they are in fact walking – but this necessity is conditional. It is conditional on the walker having chosen to walk and the observer happening to observe. The walker might not have chosen to walk, and then it would not have become necessary that at a particular present time, they were walking. This is very different from the normal sort of necessity – simple necessity – which means something cannot fail to exist or occur. The walker could have chosen not to walk. But since they chose to walk, at the present time to the person observing them walking, it became necessary that they were walking – though conditionally so. This clearly doesn’t made it necessary in the simple sense however, since they could have chosen not to walk.

From the perspective of God in the eternal present, everything is ‘present’. Everything we have done in our past, are doing in our present, and will do in our future – are all observed in God’s ‘present’. Everything we do is ‘present’ to God. Therefore, they take on the same kind of necessity as that the person walking to the other person observing them – conditional necessity. So although God knows what we are going to do in the future, for God our future is not future but ‘present’. God does not know what we are going to do ‘before’ we choose it because God’s knowledge does not exist ‘before’ we make a choice. ‘Before’ is a temporal relation. God’s knowledge exists outside of time and cannot therefore stand in a temporal relation to our choice which occurs in time.

Kenny argues that if God is eternal, then all events in history are happening at the same time for God, eg the battle of Hastings and the fire of Rome are happening at the same time as Kenny is writing his book. Kenny rejects that as ‘radically incoherent’. There a causal relation between things. The fire of Rome necessarily happened before Kenny wrote his paper. Yet if all things were perceived simultaneously, it seems an atemporal being could not know one happened before the other, but this seems to bring omniscience into question. Boethius’ view seems to wipe out the temporal distinction between events in time.

Arguably God could know the causal relations between things as a separate matter to observing them simultaneously.

It still seems incoherent to suggest an omniscient being views things falsely, however.

Anselm’s four-dimensionalist approach can be used to respond to Kenny as it arguably improves Boethius’ position. Anselm thought that God’s eternity followed from his definition of God as ‘that than which none greater may be conceived’ since he thought that being eternal was better/greater than being within time.

Anselm thought that being within a place and time was a limitation because a temporal being is ‘confined’ to having certain parts of itself existing at one place and time and other parts of itself at others. This means that as the greatest possible being, God must have his whole being present at all times and places. To be truly unlimited includes not being within any particular point of time or space.

The issue with Boethius, that Kenny points out, is that if God sees all time simultaneously, then that suggests that all temporal events really are or could be occurring simultaneously, which seems absurd since many different events in history are related by causal relations across time.

Anselm’s solution was to distinguish between temporal simultaneity and eternal simultaneity. That allows him to claim that temporal events are non-simultaneous within time but simultaneous within eternity.

Anselm explains how this could be by proposing that eternity is a higher dimension than temporality and that the lower dimension of temporality is contained within the higher dimension of eternity. Just like the first dimension of a straight line is contained within the higher third dimension of a cube. Within the first dimension there is only back and forwards along a straight line. Nonetheless those straight lines are contained within the third dimension which can go side to side as well as up and down to create a cube in three dimensions. Anselm proposes that although temporal events are distinct within the temporal dimension, nonetheless since the fourth temporal dimension is contained within the higher fifth dimension of eternity, in the sense that temporal events are in eternity they are simultaneous. Just as in the sense that straight lines are in the third dimension they can form a cube, though there are no cubes in the first dimension. So too can non-simultaneous fourth dimensional temporal events be simultaneous within the fifth eternal dimension.

Simultaneity is different in eternity than it is within time because they are different dimensions, so things can be simultaneous in eternity without being simultaneous in time. Temporal events like the fire of Rome and Kenny writing his paper are indeed distinct temporal events within time and yet occur simultaneously with God in eternity. So, it’s not that God is outside time viewing it as it ‘truly is’, as seems a consequence of Boethius’ formulation, which has the seemingly absurd consequence of denying temporal distinction between events in time. Rather, Anselm holds that different temporal events are distinct within time, yet that temporal dimension is contained within a higher eternal dimension in which all temporal events are simultaneous with God and with one-another.

So, the distinctness of temporal events is maintained in the face of eternal simultaneity of all events by relating temporality to eternity in that eternity contains the lower dimension of temporality.

Distinct temporal events like the fire of Rome and battle of Hastings cannot be simultaneous, just like a straight line cannot be a cube in the first dimension. However in the third dimension, straight lines can make up a cube, just as in the eternal dimension distinct temporal events can be simultaneous.

Anselm then addresses the free will issue by claiming that while events within time such as future actions are not fixed, nonetheless in eternity they are occurring simultaneously with all other events. “that which in eternity cannot be changed, is changeable by free will at some time before it exists.” Our future actions do not yet exist within time, yet in eternity they always exist. So, God knows our future actions because he exists simultaneously with them in eternity, though within time they are not yet fixed.

Aquinas agrees with Boethius, arguing that time and change are inseparable. Since God is perfect, he cannot change, since any change for a perfect being would necessarily be a change away from perfection. Therefore God cannot change, but therefore he cannot be in time.

Everlasting: Swinburne – claims God exists within time and so knows what we have done in the past and what we are doing in the present. Regarding the future, God only knows the logically possible choices we could make, not which choice we will actually make.

Swinburne argues that we can’t make sense of the statement ‘God knows the events of AD 1995’ unless God really existed in 1995 and knew what was happening. So God must exist within time.

Swinburne argues that an eternal God could not respond to people’s prayers, since that would require acting within time.

Aquinas argues that Prayers aren’t responded to however. The function of a prayer is to make people feel psychologically closer to God.

Swinburne argued that a relationship with God based on love is a two-way process which requires an ability for God to respond to us, and vice versa. This could only work if God was within time.

Wolterstorff argued that it only makes sense to understand God’s actions in the bible if we see them as responses to human’s free choices. E.g the 10 plagues of Egypt. God sent the first plague, waited to see if the Pharaoh would let the Jews go. He didn’t, so God sent the second plague, and so on until plague number 10. Wolterstorff argued that God being omniscient doesn’t include knowledge of the future. The future doesn’t yet exist, therefore knowledge of it would be illogical

However, Jesus also knows that Judas will betray him and that peter would betray him three times before the cockerel crowed. So it seems that Jesus/God does know future human actions.

Religious language – negative, analogical or symbolic

Via Negativa – Pseudo-Dionysus argued that God is ‘beyond every assertion’, beyond language. He therefore cannot be described is positive terms i.e by saying what he ‘is’. God can only

be described negatively or ‘via negativa’ – by saying what God is ‘not’. Maimodenies also argued for the via negative because humans cannot know God in his essential nature and therefore cannot speak about what God is. Maimodenies used the illustration of a ship. By describing what a ship is not, we get closer to describing what a ship is.

Arguably we only get closer to describing what a ship is because we already know what it is. If we describe everything a ship is not, this leaves a ship shaped hole in our description. However describing everything that God is not does not leave a God shaped hole in our description. So we don’t get closer to describing what God is by saying what he is not.

If we say that God is not human or physical or earthly then we do at least avoid anthropomorphasising God which gets us closer to describing God than if we were left with our confused via positiva view.

Analogy. Aquinas agreed with the Via Negativa to an extent since he thought humans were fundamentally unable to know God in his essential nature. However he thought we could go a bit further than only talking about God negatively – he argued we can talk about God meaningfully in positive terms by analogy. An analogy is an attempt to explain the meaning of something which is difficult to understand by using a comparison with something familiar and easier to understand. Aquinas rejected univocal and equivocal language when talking about God.

Univocal: statements that mean the same thing for God and humans (e.g. God’s love and my love – love means the same thing)Equivocal: statement that mean different for God and humans (e.g. God is wise and I am wise)We cannot interpret God univocally because we are anthropomorphising him, how could words describing us apply to a transcendent infinite being? We cannot interpret God equivocally because it leaves us unable to understand what our words mean when applied to God since we don’t know God. That would leave religious language meaningless

So, it’s wrong to say we are completely the same as God, but it’s also wrong to say we’re completely different. The middle ground Aquinas finds is to say we are ‘like’ God – Analogous to God.Aquinas thought through analogy (explaining something complex by comparing it to something simple/brain and computers), we can talk about God meaningfully. Religious language attempts to describe the attributes or qualities of God. Aquinas believed there were 3 types of analogy that could allow religious language to be meaningful.

Analogy of Attribution:· The qualities that we observe of something, tells us about the source of that thing.· From seeing the urine of a Bull is healthy, we can conclude that the Bull is healthy· We can attribute qualities to the nature of God by looking at what he has created.· For example, regularity and purpose infers a designer.· For example, motherhood and protection infers a loving God.· We can draw limited conclusion about the maker

Analogy of Proportion:· The quality of attribute of something (musical talent), depends on the nature of the being (age)· The quality of these attributes are proportionally related to the nature of the being· For example, as you get older, you will get better at playing music· Finite qualities in the mundane are related proportionally to infinite qualities in the divine· For example, a baby’s linguistics are proportionally related to the speaking ability of an adult· A mother’s finite love is proportionally related to God’s infinite love

Proper Proportion:

1. Humans possess the same qualities like those of God (goodness/wisdom/love)2. Because we were created in the image and likeness of God3. But, because we are inferior, we possess the qualities in lesser proportion

Verificationists can criticize analogy for religious language as what is being illustrated cannot be empirically verified.

Richard Swinburne argues that speaking univocally is better, when we say ‘we are good’ and ‘God is good’, we mean the same by good.

(counter: Aquinas would say that we cannot apply the same meaning to a transcendent, limitless being)

The accuracy problem: the analogy that ‘electricity behaves like water’ works because we can determine the shared qualities (flow, current and power), and the differences (danger, state of matter). But we can only know this by comparing knowledge of both things. When we make analogies to God, we cannot know how accurate we are.

Aquinas arguably doesn’t require that we know how accurate we are, just that we know that we are like God. If that’s all we claim, then we are speaking positively about God and so the cataphatic way is successful, perhaps in a very limited sense but successful nonetheless.

Karl Barth thinks humans are incapable, on their own, of understanding God. ‘The finite has no capacity for the infinite’. He argues the analogical approach is flawed because it starts from a human understanding, and via attribution and proportion, claims to understand God. Analogy anthropomorphises God.

While some might anthropomorphise God, arguably Aquinas guards against that because he is very clear that we cannot know God’s essential nature, just that it is like ours in some way.

Arguably the infinite is not proportional to the finite. So we can’t say that God is like us just proportionally greater. Attribution also fails because there are instances where things create something radically different to or at least simply without one attribute that the creator had. E.g. a potter is conscious but creates unconscious pots. For all we know, God’s attributes are totally unlike ours.

The bible claims we were created in God’s image and likeness, however. So we must be like God in some respect, which seems to leave room for analogy.

Proponents of revealed theology like Barth thinks that the fall corrupted the imagio dei however.

Arguably it’s an assumption to claim to know which attribute of ours (e.g. goodness, wisdom or power) are the ones that are analogous to God’s attributes. The bull and urine is an example which supports Aquinas because both urine and a bull can be healthy and indeed the health of the urine justifies attributing health to the bull. However, our creation by God might not be of the sort where attributes in the creator are bestowed to its creation.

We can at least say that we are like God in some way, however, which although a very limited statement would count as successful via positiva.

Symbol (Paul Tillich)Paul Tillich developed a theory of religious language that centres on the notion of symbols. Language is only meaningful – in so far as it – participates in the being of God. This active participation by language in a thing’s existence is the fundamental characteristic of being a symbol.

Tillich makes a clear distinction between: words as signs v words as symbols. What is the difference from a sign saying Fiji, and the 0 A sign attaches a label, but the symbol participates in it what it points to (e.g. the cross is a powerful symbol because it represents Christianity and points to the death of Jesus) This is Tilich’s theory of participation by which he defines the core aspects of what gives something symbolic meaning:

Pointing: words have to point to something, a meaning (“I threw a ball” – tells you something v “I ball a throw” – tells you nothingParticipation: It means that it is more than just a label. The symbol has a participation in what it is pointing to. For example, “I love you” participates in the act of loving someone.Revealing: To be symbolic has to reveal a deeper meaning, they open up levels of reality that are otherwise closed to us.Changeable: Symbols can change what they point to or may fail to consistently point to them. They open up the levels of dimensions of the soul that correspond to those levels of reality. E.g. the American flag used to be yellow with a snake, this flag doesn’t point to America anymore.

Tillich thought that the language of faith was symbolic language. He thought symbolic language was like a poetry or a piece of art - it can offer a new view of life or a new meaning to life, but is hard to explain to people who haven’t experienced it, or not heard the poetry or seen the piece of art. Tillich thought that religious language is a symbolic way of pointing towards the ultimate realityThe vision of God which he called the ‘ground of being’. We have come to know this through symbols.

Relationship with truth and empiricism:A phrase like “I love you” goes beyond simple empirical measure. There is a deep truth revealed by symbolic language but it is not an empirical truth. It is a different existential domain.

Aquinas would argue that ‘God’ is not just a symbol but a cognitive belief about reality.

Very hard to distinguish when language is being used normally and symbolically. For example, the religious language that Jesus was born in Bethlehem seems to be a fact not symbolic. When is language meaningful? It is hard to understand - the idea of a deeper meaning we know but cannot explain is ineffable and weak. Unpersuasive and empirically invalid.

John Hick argued that ‘symbols participate in the reality they point’ is not entirely clear, especially this symbolic language is affirmed and negated by what they participate in. Many religious people would argue some religious language is literal.

Symbolic language is changeable and prone to mistakes, stale through overuse, lost meanings over time.

Tillich counter: we cant rediscover the questions Christian symbols are an answer to, that are understandable in our time.

20th century philosophy of languageVerificationism was invented by the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers, the most famous of which was A. J. Ayer. Their theory of meaning was that words get their meaning by connecting to the world or by being true by definition. If a word connects to the world, that connection should be verifiable. The verification principle states that in order to be

meaningful, something must be either 1) analytically true or 2) empirically verifiable. Religious language is neither analytically true nor empirically verifiable because ‘God’ is a metaphysical term according to Ayer which means it is about something beyond the empirical world, so there can be no way to empirically verify it.

Ayer’s theory was criticised for being overly restrictive of meaning. Wouldn’t History be considered meaningless because it can’t be empirically verified?

To respond to this, Ayer came up with weak and strong verification. We can strongly verify whatever we can conclusively verify by observation and experience, so there is no doubt about it. We can weakly verify anything for which there is some evidence which points to its probably being the case. E.g. Historical documents and archaeological findings can be strongly verified, and on the basis of those we can weakly verify that there were certain civilisations in the past with certain histories to them.

Ayer argued for weak verification, that if it’s possible to know what would verify a statement in principle, then it is meaningful. However Ayer was dissatisfied with this strong/weak distinction.

The problem with strong verification is that it can’t apply to anything, since mere observation cannot establish conclusive proof of anything beyond all doubt. The problem with weak verification is that it could potentially justify anything

Ayer accepted this and finally improved his theory into:

Direct verification – a statement that is verifiable by observation Indirect verification – when things we have directly verified support a statement

which we can’t directly verify, we can be said to have indirect verification for it.

The verification principle cannot verify itself. It states that to be meaningful a statement must be analytic or empirically verifiable. However, that means that in order for the verification principle itself to be meaningful, it must be analytic or empirically verifiable. If we try to take the verification principle empirically then it would be an empirical claim that if we investigate what kind of meaning people use then we will see that it is either analytic or empirical. But that appears to be false since empirical evidence shows that people have meant something else by meaning throughout history e.g. Plato found it meaningful to talk of the world of forms and theologians find it meaningful to talk of God, both of which involve unempirical metaphysical terms.

Ayer responds by admitting that the verification principle cannot be a factual statement about the meaning of factual statements and claims instead that it is a methodological stipulation, a rule which the logical positivist adopts for methodological purposes.

However, this appears to reduce the verification principle into a tool one might use if you already agree with empiricism. Metaphysical statements are now only meaningless to this particular empirical tool, rather than categorically meaningless.

Swinburne argued that we know what it means for toys in a cupboard to come alive when no one is there to see them, therefore no way to verify, yet it’s still meaningful.Hick argued that there is a way to verify religious language, because when we die we’ll see God and then we’ll know.

Falsificationism was invented by Karl Popper who thought he could capture empiricism better than verificationism could. Popper was impressed with Einstein who claimed Mercury would wobble in its orbit at a certain time in the future because if he was wrong, his theory would be falsified. Popper was less impressed with marxists and freudians because they only looked for verifications of their views without ever admitting a way they could be falsified. Popper illustrated this with swans the claim ‘all swans are white’ which to be verified would require knowing that at no point in time nor at any place in the universe did a non-white swan ever exist. However, the claim is falsifiable because we can say what would prove it wrong; seeing a non-white swan.

Anthony Flew applied this to religious language. He claimed that because religious people can’t say what logically possible state of affairs is incompatible with their claim that God exists (in other words, because they can’t say what would prove them wrong), they are not actually asserting anything about the way things are (since there is no entailed claim about the way things are not). Therefore Flew considers religious language meaningless.

P1 - A claim about the way the world is entails a claim about the way the world is not. (e.g saying the chair is blue entails that it is not red)P2 - Disproving something involves showing the world is not as it claims. P3 - If something cannot be disproven than it is not committed to a claim about the way the world is not.C1 – In that case, an unfalsifiable claim cannot be a claim about the way the world is.

Swinburne argued that we understand what it means for toys in a cupboard to come alive when no one is there to see it. There is no way to falsify this, yet it is still meaningful, therefore something doesn’t have to be falsifiable in order to be meaningful.

A falsificationist could respond that if someone doesn’t understand how or why the toys come alive, then perhaps they can’t really be said to actually grasp the meaning of it. This seems quite a restrictive view of meaning however. Do we have to understand something in order to know what it means?

St Paul claimed that if Jesus’ body were discovered then belief and faith in Christianity would be pointless. This suggests Flew is incorrect to think religious language is always unfalsifiable as there are at least some believers whose belief is incompatible with some logically possible state of affairs. That would show that Paul’s religious language would pass Flew’s test of falsification and so would be meaningful.

The parable of the gardener is how Flew illustrated his response to claims like St Paul’s. Two people are walking and see a garden. One claims there is a gardener who tends to it, so the other suggest waiting and seeing if that is true. After a while, the other says ‘actually, they are an invisible gardener’, so they set up barbed wire fences and so on to try and detect this invisible gardener, at which point they then say ‘actually, it’s a non-physical gardener’. Flew’s point is that this is what religious people do whenever anyone tries to empirically test their belief. Some excuse is made about why that test is not appropriate. But for every excuse made, a potential empirical foothold for God is removed, thereby causing the concept of God to ‘die a death of a thousand qualifications’ – Flew. If there is no logically possible state of affairs which we could investigate that would be incompatible with the belief in God, then it is unfalsifiable and so meaningless.Flew’s response to Paul, based on the parable of the gardener, would be that if we actually found Jesus’ body, Paul would make up some excuse as to why that test was not a valid empirical test of his religious belief after all. Perhaps he would claim the devil put a fake body there, for example.

The falsification principle cannot falsify itself and is therefore meaningless. Popper responded to this criticism by claiming that falsificationism was not a criterion of meaning, just a method of distinguishing the empirical from the non-empirical. Since Flew used falsificationism as a criterion of meaning, however, it seems he makes falsificationism vulnerable to the same criticism verificationism had.

Mitchell argued against flew’s conclusions with the parable of the partisan. Mitchell argued that rather than need to say what would prove them wrong, religious belief can be said to be connected to empirical reality if it allows empirical evidence to count against it, like the problem of evil. Mitchell imagines the example of a soldier fighting for the resistence against the government in a civil war. One day someone comes to them and claims to be the leader of the resistance, on their side, but a double agent pretending to be on the other side. The soldier decides to have faith in this person, even when they see them fighting for the government. This is analogous to faith in God, despite the counter evidence of the problem of evil. Mitchell’s point is that religious people do allow empirical evidence to count against their belief, they simply judge overall to retain faith. Their belief is connected to empirical reality as a consequence however, and can therefore be said to be cognitively meaningful according to Mitchell.

Arguably Mitchell’s criteria for falsifiability are insufficient. Merely allowing evidence to count against your belief doesn’t make it falsifiable. Only being able to say what would prove it wrong, not merely count against it, makes something falsifiable.

Blicks. R. M. Hare disagreed with the cognitivism of veriticationism and falsificationism and instead argued for non-cognitivism. Hare argued that religious language doesn’t get its meaning from attempting to describe the world, but from expressing ‘attitudes’ – which he called a Blick. The expression of attitudes is not an attempt to describe the world, therefore they cannot be true or false. Hare illustrated this with the example of a paranoid student who thought his professors were trying to kill him. Even when shown the evidence that they were not trying to kill him, by meeting them and seeing they were nice people, the student did not change their mind. Hare argued this shows that what we say about the world is really an expression of our Blick rather than an attempt to describe the world. If it were an attempt to describe the world, the meaning could be changed by that description being shown to be false. Because the meaning in the students mind was not changed by contrary evidence, Hare concluded that meaning must be connected to a non-cognitive attitude or Blick.

Although Hare saves religious language from being disregarded as a meaningless failed attempt to describe the world, nonetheless he only does so by sacrificing the ability of the meaning of religious language to have any factual content. So when a religious person says ‘God exists,’ for Hare they are really expressing their attitude rather than actually claiming that there objectively exists a God. Many religious people would claim however, that they really do mean that ‘there objectively exists a God’, irrespective of their attitude. Aquinas wrote many long books attempting to prove the seemingly cognitive belief in God true. So arguably Hare fails to capture the true meaning of religious language

Hare could respond that although many religious people may indeed feel like they are making factual claims about reality, their conception of reality is really just an aspect of their Blick. Saying God exists therefore really serves to add psychological force and grandeur to what is actually just their attitude.

Language Games – Wittgenstein advanced two theories of meaning in his life. The first was quite similar to verificationism however his second theory – language games – completely contradicted it.

The first theory is called the picture theory of meaning where Wittgenstein argued that words get their meaning by connecting to the world. More specifically, the logic of our language somehow connects to the logic of reality. Our words ‘picture’ reality by connecting to its logic.

Wittgenstein later in his life repudiated the idea that words got their meaning by connecting to the world and instead argued they got their meaning by connecting to social reality. A language game exists when multiple people communicate. Wittgenstein called it a ‘game’ because he argued that language games consisted of rules. In each social situation the people participating in it act in a certain way because they have internalised and are following a certain set of rules which govern behaviour including speech. Therefore, the meaning of their speech will be connected to those rules i.e to the social situation. There can be as many different language games as there can be different types of social interaction, I.e potentially unlimited. Nonetheless, they will all be differentiated by the set of rules which constitute them.Religious people play the religious language game. Scientists play the scientific language game. For Wittgenstein, to uproot a word from the religious language game and try to analyse it within the context of the scientific language game is to misunderstand how meaning works. Words get their meaning from the language game in which they are spoken. So it’s no surprise to Wittgenstein that Ayer finds religious language meaningless, since Ayer is not religious and therefore isn’t a participant in the religious language game as he doesn’t know the rules of it.When Wittgenstein remarks that we have to ‘know’ the rules of a game to play it, he doesn’t necessarily mean consciously. For perhaps most of human social interaction we are following rules that we have unconsciously internalised. For that reason it can be very hard to say exactly what the rules of the religious language game are, as opposed to the scientific language game which is more cognitively formalised. Wittgenstein argued that the scientific language game can be about reality, since it is about evidence, experience and reason, whereas the religious language game is about faith and social communities, conventions & emotions.

Arguably the scientific and religious language games can in fact be fused together. Behe believed you could prove god through science for example because of irreducible complexity.

However, we could respond on behalf of Wittgenstein that this particular fusion of religion and science is really itself a unique language game, dissimilar to either the religious or scientific games. Alternatively, Behe could be argued to not be playing the scientific language game since most scientists reject his ideas.

If all language is only meaningful within the context of a language game, in which language game is Wittgenstein’s theory of language games meaningful? Surely if it’s only meaningful within certain language games and not others, doesn’t that mean it’s not true? Isn’t Wittgenstein trying to rely on a meta-non-language game to describe language games, while also trying to insist there is no such thing as a meta-non-language game?

Maybe it’s meaningful within the scientific language game. It may therefore not be meaningful within other language games but still operative within them, just like human biology plays a factual role in language games within which biology has no meaning.

Wittgenstein vs Aquinas

Both Aquinas and Wittgenstein think religious language can be meaningful and that it has to be understood in a particular way. Wittgenstein thinks religious language is non-cognitive in that it relates not to facts but to social rules.

If Wittgenstein is right, it means that when a religious person says ‘God exists’ they aren’t actually claiming that in a scientific sense that there objectively exists a God. Really, they are just speaking in a certain way based on how they have learned to speak by internalising a set of behavioural rules developed in a culture over centuries.

However most religious people would object that they really do mean that there objectively exists a God. This point is most salient when considering the works of Aquinas who attempted to argue for the existence of God. Aquinas believes the proposition ‘God’s goodness is analogous to ours’ to be cognitively and objectively true. He doesn’t think he’s just following a social convention in saying so.

It’s true that religious people claim to be describing reality when they say God exists, however perhaps their word ‘reality’ is informed by their religious language game and is different to the word ‘reality’ as used in the scientific language game. So when religious people like Aquinas say ‘God exists in reality’, the word ‘reality’ is actually not referring to the scientific conception of reality.

Aquinas thinks religious language is cognitive and meaningful.Flew and Ayer would criticise this however since even if religious language is cognitive they think it needs to be verifiable or falsifiable to be cognitive and meaningful.

The criticisms of Ayer and Flew then apply here.

Wittgenstein criticises Flew and Ayer for claiming religious language is meaningless, but only by claiming it is non-cognitive.

To what extent is Aquinas’ analogical view of theological language valuable in philosophy of religion?

Many Christians, especially Catholics, find it useful to think of their claims about God as cognitive even if our limited minds cannot fully understand it.

This question just requires an evaluation of Aquinas by critically comparing him to the other theories of meaning:

Ayer’s Verification. Ayer would regard analogy as unverifiable and so meaningless.

Flew’s falsification. Flew would regard analogy as unfalsifiable and so meaningless.

Mitchel responds that religious belief based on faith is still meaningful.

Hare would claim religious language is meaningful, disagreeing with Ayer and Flew but not find Aquinas’ reasoning valuable as he regards religious language as expressing a blick, not a cognition.

Wittgenstein would also disagree with Aquinas.

If these critics of Aquinas are right, then he is not valuable. If they are wrong and he is right, he is valuable.

Should the Bible be read cognitively or non-cognitively?

Non-cognitive approaches to religious language has influenced methods of reading religious texts which some find threatening and others find inspiring.

The traditional view is that the Bible should be viewed cognitively as that is the only way to ensure that the claims in it such as that Jesus rose from the dead are factual. The non-cognitive approach seems to threaten this.

However for that reason, non-cognitive approaches can be used to avoid the critique of religious belief posed by modern science. Many claims in the Bible, such as that God created the world in 7 days and made men from dust, if taken cognitively as expressing beliefs that can be true or false, science seems to suggest they are false. When faith is all that is offered as support for belief in any aspect of the Bible, and one aspect is then shown to be false, all other parts supported by faith then look doubtful. This opens up the entire Bible to criticism as false.

Many Christians however find a way to view parts of the Bible as metaphorical or at least written in a way that reflects the historical context of the ancient world, while viewing other parts as literal. For example the claim that Jesus rose from the dead can be viewed literally yet the creation story has to be viewed metaphorically since we just can’t put into literal words what it means for God to create the universe.

Bultmann argued for a particular kind of non-cognitive reading of the bible called myth. In ancient times, to describe a person you might tell a story about them. That story wasn’t intended to be cognitively/factually true, but to communicate what that person was like. Bultmann believed that was the intention of the authors of the Bible; they did not mean to write a set of historical facts. Myths communicate deep truths and values. They are more significant than a made-up fictional story. They deal with important questions about life. E.g ancient Roman and Greek mythology which thereby preserve cultural identity. Bultman argued that the modern audience is very different to the ancient one, and often mistakenly takes the bible to be literal and cognitive in meaning. We should therefore demythologise the bible according to Bultmann, which means to re-write it, replacing the stories with the deeper truth they intend to convey. For example, a story about Jesus healing a sick person really intended to convey that God loves and cares about our well-being and will endeavour to help us. Since that is the true meaning, we should replace the story with that message, thereby demythologising the bible.

Aren’t the ‘deep truth’ Myths intend to convey down to interpretation and therefore subjective? How could we ever know we had ascertained the ‘true’ meaning?

Many parts of the bible seem to be literal – e.g saying Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Nor does the bible anywhere say you shouldn’t take it literally. So is there really biblical support for this view?

Bultmann responds that parts of the bible are myth, whereas other parts are literal.But then how do we know which parts are which?

Hare and Wittgenstein would argue that their theories of meaning accurately capture religious language and therefore should frame interpretation of religious texts.

Criticisms of Hare and Wittgenstein, especially that religious people mean to say that God really exists in a cognitive sense, apply here.