Teleological Argument

The teleological argument compares how things were made in nature to the things built by man. Since the things built by man require a creator, then the things in nature must require a creator as well. Paley gives an example of the teleological argument through the watch example. The example is of him walking and stumbling across a stone, and then being asked how the stone came to be there. Paley said, “I might possibly answer that for anything I knew to the contrary it had lain there forever...” Paley then goes on to say that if he had found a watch on the ground and asked how the watch happened to be in that place? Paley says that he would not have to think about it how it got there but that the “watch might have always been there.” Now you might question why the answers are different for the stone and watch. Paley’s idea as I understand it is that the watch has a purpose-it is made from small parts and therefor the creator or designer made the watch to serve a purpose. Whereas the stone is not made from smaller parts and therefore does not have a designer or creator.

The main question Paley is asking is whether the object was designed or not? He uses contrivance and contriver as proof of design, but no designer. Paley says there must be a designer for the universe based on the watch example and how things are made with a purpose. The strength for this argument is that most can agree with this idea. It is believed in religion that we are made in God’s image so for us to have a purpose in life makes sense. It also makes sense that God created the things in nature to have a purpose because otherwise, why would God put useless things on this earth. Are there weaknesses to this idea? It depends on the person because that person would either believe there is a creator or there is no creator. If there is no creator, then where did the things in nature come from?

In recommended reading, Davies states two arguments about the divine design. The first says the universe displays design in the sense of purpose. The second argument is that it (being the universe) displays design in the sense of regularity. Paley’s example of finding the stone and watch is the example of the universe displaying design as a purpose. Davies goes on to suggest that Paley says “the universe resembles a watch and must therefore be accounted for in terms of intelligent and purposive agency.” I agree with Paley’s idea that we are created with a purpose as the watch, was designed for a purpose to tell time.

 Another idea about the design argument. The article explains that the teleological argument is wrong and that we were designed from science such as through natural selection. What do you think about article, are we contraptions? I believe this article makes sense in some ways, but I believe there is a creator who designed the universe.

Miracles

I would like to start off with Hume’s perspective on Miracles.  Hume starts off by defining what a miracle is; he says that a miracle is a violation of the laws of nature. This means that events such as people dying and fires are found agreeable to nature, and in order for them to be a miracle a violation is required to prevent them and make them not agreeable to nature, Hume uses the example of a dead man coming back to life. The whole second paragraph Hume explains his view more strongly he says that the probability that a person’s testimony of a miracle being wrong outweighs the probability of that person testimony of a miracle being right.

 Swinburne on the other hand I feel believes that miracles are more likely to happen than Hume does.  Swinburne talks about what he thinks miracles would be, and they are things; such as Levitations, Resurrection from the dead in full health of a man whose heart has not been beating for twenty four hours, water turning into wine without the assistance of chemicals, and then a man getting better from polio in a minute. In Swinburne’s piece he also talks about Hume’s perspective. He starts off with a scenario, if there were two hundred people to have witnessed the same event which was a non-repeatable event, and that these people would be willing to prove that the event did not occur if there were grounds to do so. He next asks the question does the combined evidence prove that the event in fact did happen. Swinburne tells us that Hume’s answer would be no, which would be getting to the point that Hume’s standards of evidence are too high.

 I believe that Swinburne is trying to show us that he himself believes more in miracles than Hume does. It seems to me that Hume doses not believe in miracles at all. Swinburne examples of miraculous events are pretty close to what the Bible says a miracle is. To me this also shows that Swinburne is more of a believer.

Is free will responsible for the evil that occurs in the world?  Most theists would say yes to this question.  It can be argued that because God gave humans the ability to make the wrong choice or the right one, it follows that evil can be the direct effect of poor decision making.  God could have made a world in which the creatures he created would only do the right thing all the time but most would agree that we would be no better off than robots in this kind of environment and that a world of free agents is better than this kind of scenario.  God also could have made a world in which the decisions we made only had a minimal effect on the whole of humanity or what Robert Swinburne refers to as a “toy world”.  Free will can be directly traced to evil then but also to the good that can be found in it.  Aquinas believed that God is the cause of everything good, bad, or indifferent and that it does not affect his omnipotence in the slightest because God is not good by human standards of morality but good in the sense of all that is good directly flows from him and all that is desirable can be found in him.  There is no easy explanation for the evil that exists in the world but even a good parent can be seen as an example of letting their child go through some hardships to learn valuable life lessons.  If the child learns from the hardship not to make the same mistake they will be better equipped for adulthood; does it follow then that God allows for us to make wrong choices with the hopes and expectations that we will learn from them but that some never learn from the mistakes and so the problems get compounded?  This type of reasoning doesn’t explain away things like hurricanes and volcanos, but to this Aquinas believes that God only works within the boundaries of nature and that this also is not reflective on the goodness of God.

Kony 2012

Thought that after the discussions we've had the past few classes this would be an interesting video for anyone to check out if they were interested. Speaks a great deal about evil and our responsibility for it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc

"The Value of Soul Making" from Evil and the Good of Love

Social/Cultural Evolution

Hick makes the argument that the phenomena of evil comes from the process of developing a human soul which is what happens through out our lives in our efforts to become more like God. He states that this is a necessary part of life and that evil is a necessary byproduct of this journey, but that this journey is the result of us as a human population having rational thought and the idea of a God to follow and is not the result of an evolutionary phenomena. Until this point I actually agreed with Hick, but being a biology major I found it difficult to discredit an evolutionary theory without examining it further.

The evolutionary theory I believe applies to this reading the best is that of cultural/social evolution. This theory describes how societies and cultures change over time, our human population has gone through more drastic change over time than I believe can be explained without the help of an evolutionary theory. It is important to note that sociocultural evolution is not the same as cultural development, development involves the integration of differentiations and increases in overall complexity of the society itself. This contrasts with sociocultural evolution because evolution implies this; the process by which structural reorganization is affected through time, eventually producing a form or structure which is qualitatively different from the ancestral form. This can be easily seen in the contrast of the hunter gatherer lifestyle of the caveman to the relatively easy and carefree life comparatively we live as humans today. All pathways of evolution are based on the presence of variation in a population and the presence of evil is most easily explained as the essential variation that drives the process and makes it work.

It has been argued that the development of God himself is a product of the sociocultural evolution of the human race, and I think this is a good place to start class discussion on this reading itself; it is a fairly widely accepted fact that the structures and the way of life we live today as humans is vastly different from what it was at the beginning of the human race, but is God, the driving life force behind every being also just a product of a similar kind of evolutionary pathway? If yes, then the presence of God is a natural phenomena that has been allowed by nature, from a scientific perspective, how could this have benefited humans enough in order to be selected for?

Fallacies

Description of Fallacies

In order to understand what a fallacy is, one must understand what an argument is. Very briefly, an argument consists of one or more premises and one conclusion. A premise is a statement (a sentence that is either true or false) that is offered in support of the claim being made, which is the conclusion (which is also a sentence that is either true or false).
There are two main types of arguments: deductive and inductive. A deductive argument is an argument such that the premises provide (or appear to provide) complete support for the conclusion. An inductive argument is an argument such that the premises provide (or appear to provide) some degree of support (but less than complete support) for the conclusion. If the premises actually provide the required degree of support for the conclusion, then the argument is a good one. A good deductive argument is known as a valid argument and is such that if all its premises are true, then its conclusion must be true. If all the argument is valid and actually has all true premises, then it is known as a sound argument. If it is invalid or has one or more false premises, it will be unsound. A good inductive argument is known as a strong (or "cogent") inductive argument. It is such that if the premises are true, the conclusion is likely to be true.
A fallacy is, very generally, an error in reasoning. This differs from a factual error, which is simply being wrong about the facts. To be more specific, a fallacy is an "argument" in which the premises given for the conclusion do not provide the needed degree of support. A deductive fallacy is a deductive argument that is invalid (it is such that it could have all true premises and still have a false conclusion). An inductive fallacy is less formal than a deductive fallacy. They are simply "arguments" which appear to be inductive arguments, but the premises do not provided enough support for the conclusion. In such cases, even if the premises were true, the conclusion would not be more likely to be true.

Evil and Omnipotence

J.L. Mackie states the problem like this "If God is omnipotent (all powerful) and wholly good than why does evil exist?  The four arguments he cites are 1) Good cannot exist without evil. 2) Evil is necessary as a means to good. 3) The universe is better with some evil in it than it could be if there were no evil. and finally 4) Evil is due to human freewill.  There are several problems to each argument as Mackie sees it.  Mainly that each argument somehow either questions God's power or his goodness, ie.., if humans can see that evil is a problem why couldn't God see it?  Or if Evil was necessary did there need to be so much of it?  Or in the case of human freewill could God have just made us with freewill when we were about to do something bad?  Mackie only brings this questions to the readers attention he never asserts a final position on any of them, he leaves that up to the reader.  I did find this interesting analogy about a man who creates a robot with the capacity to learn and make decisions.  He also makes it with abilities like the ability to kick, with the hopes that the robot would kick balls back to little children in the playground, or maybe kick grenades out of harms way for soldiers.  The robot however develops a penchant for kicking puppies, it goes out of its way to hunt down the cutest and fluffiest puppies just to kick them.  Maybe God did not design us for doing evil but we just acquired a taste for it.