A survey of religious studies literature finds totems, witchcraft, the rights of man, Marxism, liberalism, Japanese tea ceremonies, nationalism, sports, free market ideology, and a host of other institutions and practices treated under the rubric “religion.” 8 If one tries to limit the definition of religion to belief in God or gods, then Arguments that God does not exist. In Nyāya Sūtra's Book 4, Chapter 1, verses 19–21, postulates God exists, states a consequence, then presents contrary evidence, and from contradiction concludes that the postulate must be invalid. The Lord is the cause, since we see that human action lacks results Sep 29, · Theology Unleashed: Matt Dillahunty is a seasoned debater, the current president of the Atheist Community of Austin, and the well known host of The Atheist blogger.com has debated Jordan Peterson, David Wood and a host of other theists, and has shared stages with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Laurence Krauss
Logical Problem of Evil | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Worldwide there may be as many as a billion atheists, although social stigma, political pressure, and intolerance make accurate polling difficult. For the most part, atheists have presumed that the most reasonable conclusions are the ones that have the best evidential support. For detailed discussion of those arguments and the major challenges to them that have motivated the atheist conclusion, the reader is encouraged to consult the other relevant sections of the encyclopedia.
Arguments for the non-existence of God are deductive or inductive. The existence of widespread human and non-human suffering is incompatible with an all powerful, all knowing, all good being. Discoveries about the origins and nature of the universe, and about the evolution of life on Earth make the God hypothesis an unlikely explanation. Widespread non-belief and the lack of compelling evidence show that a God who seeks belief in humans does not exist.
Broad considerations from science that support naturalism, or the view that all and only physical entities and causes exist, have also led many to the atheism conclusion. The presentation below provides an overview of concepts, arguments, and issues that are central to work on atheism. Atheism is the view that there is no God. At a minimum, this being is usually understood as having all power, all knowledge, and being infinitely good or morally perfect. See the article Western Concepts of God for more details.
There have been many thinkers in history who have lacked a belief in God. Some ancient Greek philosophers, such as Epicurus, sought natural explanations for natural phenomena. Epicurus was also to first to question the compatibility of God with suffering, does god exist essay. Forms of philosophical naturalism that would replace all supernatural explanations with natural ones also extend into ancient history.
During does god exist essay Enlightenment, David Hume and Immanuel Kant give influential critiques of the traditional arguments for the existence of God in the 18 th century. After Darwin makes the case for evolution and some modern advancements in science, a fully articulated philosophical worldview that denies the existence of God gains traction.
In the 19 th and 20 th centuries, influential critiques on God, belief in God, and Christianity by NietzscheFeuerbach, Marx, Freudand Camus set the stage for modern atheism. It has come to be widely accepted that to be an atheist is to affirm the non-existence of God. Anthony Flew called this positive atheismwhereas to lack a belief that God or gods exist is to be a negative atheist. Agnosticism is traditionally characterized as neither believing that God exists nor believing that God does not exist.
Atheism can be narrow does god exist essay wide in scope. The narrow atheist does not believe in the existence of God an omni- being. A wide atheist does not believe that any gods exist, including but not limited to the traditional omni-God. The wide positive atheist denies that God exists, and also denies that Zeus, Gefjun, Thor, does god exist essay, Sobek, Bakunawa and others exist.
The narrow atheist does not believe that God exists, does god exist essay, but need not take a stronger view about the existence or non-existence does god exist essay other supernatural beings. One could be a narrow atheist about God, but still believe in the existence of some other supernatural entities. This is one of the reasons that it is a mistake to identify atheism with materialism or naturalism. Separating these different senses of the term allows us to better understand the different sorts of justification that can be given for varieties of atheism with different scopes.
An argument does god exist essay serve to justify one form of atheism and not another. For Instance, does god exist essay, alleged contradictions within a Christian conception of God by themselves do not serve as evidence for wide atheism, but presumably, reasons that are adequate to show that there is no omni-God would be sufficient to show that there is no Islamic God.
We can divide the justifications for atheism into several categories. An asymmetry exists between theism and atheism in that atheists have not offered faith as a justification for non-belief. That is, atheists have not presented non-evidentialist defenses for believing that there is no God.
Not all theists appeal only to faith, however. Evidentialists theist and evidentialist atheists may have a number of general epistemological principles concerning evidence, arguments, and implication in common, but then disagree about what the evidence is, how it should be understood, and what it implies. They may disagree, for instance, about whether the values of the physical constants and laws in nature constitute evidence for intentional fine tuning, but agree at least that whether God exists is a matter that can be explored empirically or with reason, does god exist essay.
Many non-evidentialist theists may deny that the acceptability of particular religious claim depends upon evidence, reasons, or arguments as they have been classically understood. Faith or prudential based beliefs in God, for example, will fall into this category. The evidentialist atheist and the non-evidentialist theist, therefore, may have a number of more fundamental disagreements about the acceptability of believing, despite inadequate or contrary evidence, the epistemological status of prudential grounds for believing, or the nature of God belief.
Their disagreement may not be so much about the evidence, or even about God, but about the legitimate roles that evidence, reason, and faith should play in human belief structures. It is not clear that arguments against atheism that appeal to faith have any prescriptive force the way appeals to evidence do.
The general evidentialist view is that when a person grasps that an argument is sound that imposes an epistemic obligation on her to accept the conclusion, does god exist essay. Failing to believe what is clearly supported by the evidence is ordinarily irrational.
Failure to have faith that some claim is true is not similarly culpable, does god exist essay. Justifying atheism, then, can entail several different projects. There are the evidential disputes over what information we have available to us, how it should be interpreted, and what it implies.
There are also broader meta-epistemological concerns about the roles of argument, reasoning, belief, and religiousness in human life. The atheist can find herself not just arguing that the evidence indicates that there is no God, but defending science, the role of reason, and the necessity of basing beliefs on evidence more generally. Friendly atheism; William Rowe has introduced an important distinction to modern discussions of atheism, does god exist essay.
It seems that the atheist could take one of several views. Rowe Rowe and most modern epistemologists have said that whether a conclusion C is justified for a person S is a function of the information correct or incorrect that S possesses and the principles of inference that S employs in arriving at C. But whether or not C is justified is not directly tied to its truth, or even to the truth of the evidence concerning C.
That is, a person can have a justified, but false belief. She could arrive at a conclusion through an epistemically inculpable process and yet get it wrong. Ptolemy, for example, the greatest astronomer of his day, who had mastered all of the available information and conducted exhaustive research into the question, was justified in concluding that the Sun orbits the Earth.
A medieval physician in the s who guesses correctly that the bubonic plague was caused by the bacterium yersinia pestis would not have been reasonable or justified given his background information and given that the bacterium would not even be discovered for years.
We can call the view that rational, justified beliefs can be false, as it applies to does god exist essay, friendly or fallibilist atheism. See the article on Fallibilism. What could explain their divergence to the atheist? The believer may not be in possession of all of the relevant information.
The believer may be basing her conclusion on a false premise or premises. The believer may be implicitly or explicitly employing inference rules that themselves does god exist essay not reliable or truth preserving, does god exist essay, but the background information she has leads her, reasonably, does god exist essay, to trust the inference rule.
It is also possible, of course, for both sides to be unfriendly and conclude that anyone who disagrees with what they take to be justified is being irrational. Atheists have offered a wide range of justifications and accounts for non-belief. Flew argues that the default position for any rational believer should be neutral with regard to the existence of God and to be neutral is to not have a belief regarding its existence.
Beyond that, coming to believe that such a thing does or does not exist will require justification, much as a jury presumes innocence concerning the accused and requires evidence in order to conclude that he is guilty. We shall call this view atheism by default. The atheism by default position contrasts with a more permissive attitude that is sometimes taken regarding religious belief.
The notions of religious tolerance and freedom are sometimes understood to indicate the epistemic permissibility of believing despite a lack of evidence in favor or even despite evidence to the contrary. One is in violation of no epistemic duty by believing, even if one lacks conclusive evidence in favor or even if one has evidence that is on the whole against.
This sort of epistemic policy about God or any other matter has been controversial, and a major point of contention between atheists and theists. Atheists have argued that we typically do not take it to be epistemically inculpable or reasonable for a person to believe in Santa Claus, does god exist essay, the Tooth Fairy, or some other supernatural being merely because they do not possess evidence to the contrary.
Nor would we consider it reasonable for a person to begin believing does god exist essay they have cancer because they do not have proof to the contrary.
The atheist by default argues that it would be appropriate to not believe in such circumstances. The epistemic policy here takes its inspiration from an influential piece by W. Clifford in which he argues that it is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything for which there is insufficient reason.
There are several other approaches to the justification of atheism that we will consider below. There is a family of arguments, sometimes known as exercises in deductive atheology, for the conclusion that the existence of God is impossible. Another large group of important and influential arguments can be gathered under the heading inductive atheology.
These probabilistic arguments invoke considerations about the natural world such as widespread suffering, nonbelief, or findings from biology or cosmology. Another approach, atheistic noncognitivism, denies that God talk is even meaningful or has any propositional content that can be evaluated in terms of truth or falsity.
Rather, religious speech acts are better viewed as a complicated sort does god exist essay emoting or expression of spiritual passion. Inductive and deductive approaches are cognitivistic in that they accept that claims about God have meaningful content and can be determined to be true or false. Many discussions about the nature and existence of God have either implicitly or explicitly accepted that the concept of God is logically coherent. That is, does god exist essay, for many believers and non-believers the assumption has been that such a being as God could possibly exist but they have disagreed about whether there actually is one.
Atheists within the deductive atheology tradition, does god exist essay, have not even granted that God, as he is typically described, is possible. The first question we should ask, argues the deductive atheist, is whether the description or the concept is logically consistent.
If it is not, then no such being could possibly exist. Since logical impossibilities are not and cannot be real, God does not and cannot exist.
Consider a putative description of an object as a four-sided triangle, a married bachelor, or prime number with more than 2 factors. We can be certain that no such thing fitting that description exists because what they describe is demonstrably impossible. If deductive atheological proofs are successful, the results are epistemically significant.
Many people have doubts that the view that there is no God can be rationally justified. But if deductive disproofs show that there can exist no being with a certain property or properties and those properties figure essentially in the characterization of God, then we will have the strongest possible justification for concluding that there is no being fitting any of those characterizations.
If Does god exist essay is impossible, then God does not exist. It may be possible at this point to re-engineer the description of God so that it avoids the difficulties, but as a consequence the theist faces several challenges according to the deductive atheologist.
WE ASKED: DOES GOD EXIST IN 2020?
, time: 6:32Debate: Does God Exist? (Egnor Vs. Dillahunty) | Apologetics
Jun 12, · Probably, if God does not exist, humans would not possess objective moral knowledge. Probably, God exists. There is a kind of argument from moral knowledge also implicit in Angus Ritchie’s recent book From Morality to Metaphysics: The Theistic Implications of our Ethical Commitments () Arguments that God does not exist. In Nyāya Sūtra's Book 4, Chapter 1, verses 19–21, postulates God exists, states a consequence, then presents contrary evidence, and from contradiction concludes that the postulate must be invalid. The Lord is the cause, since we see that human action lacks results From (9′) through (12′), it is not possible to conclude that God does not exist. The most that can be concluded is that either God does not exist or God has a morally sufficient reason for allowing evil. So, some theists suggest that the real question
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