Of the traditional arguments trying to prove the existence of God (ontological argument, cosmological argument, argument from design, and argument from beauty), the argument from beauty is one of the most popular, persuasive, and easy to understand. For instance, surely the beautiful image below is evidence of a divine artist …
In helping students question the argument from beauty, there is no need to upset them by showing the image below, but a gentler analogous image can be used to show the argument from beauty is specialpleading, picking and choosing images that might support a religious belief and ignoring those that don’t. Eg:
(wiki)
And besides, beauty is not in the world, but in the eye of the beholder: eg one person sees a dilapidated bungalow, while another sees it as a quaint cottage; or, one person see a mansion as magnificent, while a minimalist sees it as gawdy.
Queen’s Gate Junior School. Should people be forced to vote? What makes a vote fair? Is a vote a fair way to make a decision?🗳Questions which are being debated by III Form in their @philosophyfound workshop this afternoon.
Consider this. In making water as necessary for life, God could have ensured water is abundant and all clean. Did God bother to do this? No:
The World Health Organization says that every year more than 3.4 million people die as a result of water related diseases, making it the leading cause of disease and death around the world. Most of the victims are young children, the vast majority of whom die of illnesses caused by organisms that thrive in water sources contaminated by raw sewage.
A report published recently in the medical journal The Lancet concluded that poor water sanitation and a lack of safe drinking water take a greater human toll than war, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction combined.
According to an assessment commissioned by the United Nations, 4,000 children die each day as a result of diseases caused by ingestion of filthy water. The report says four out of every 10 people in the world, particularly those in Africa and Asia, do not have clean water to drink. see https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-2005-03-17-voa34-67381152/274768.html
But, what if it would have been too difficult for God to make available lots of clean water? This doesn’t help, since surely God could have created a world without earthquakes, tornados, hurricanes, childhood cancer, etc.
We often hear that God is to be thanked for all the good things in life, but never blamed for any of the bad stuff. This is not how Justice works. If God is not Evil, but merely Indifferent, how would we hold such an absentee landlord accountable if He was a human? According to the law:
In United States law, depraved-heart murder, also known as depraved-indifference murder, is a type of murder where an individual acts with a “depraved indifference” to human life and where such act results in a death, despite that individual not explicitly intending to kill. In a depraved-heart murder, defendants commit an act even though they know their act runs an unusually high risk of causing death or serious bodily harm to a person. If the risk of death or bodily harm is great enough, ignoring it demonstrates a “depraved indifference” to human life and the resulting death is considered to have been committed with malice aforethought. In some states, depraved-heart killings constitute second-degree murder, while in others, the act would be charged with “wanton murder,” varying degrees of manslaughter, or third-degree murder. (Wiki)
It’s amazing how people respond to God in a way utterly foreign to how they would treat a human, such as hoping Jesus will come back and be a political dictator, or getting promoted to heaven for the special privilege of praising and feeding God’s ego constantly for all eternity!
This is a recent post by Jeana Jorgensen, who studied folklore under Alan Dundes at the University of California, Berkeley, and went on to earn her PhD in folklore from Indiana University. She addresses the issue of censorship in education.
These have been shared by philosopher Garrett Pendergraft
1 The Bridge Riddle
2 Coming and Going
In 1978 the Chronicle of Higher Education mentioned an old exam question:
Q. How far can a dog run into the woods?
A. Halfway. The rest of the time he is running out.
Harvard’s Richard E. Baym wrote in to take issue with the answer:
The correct answer is ‘All the way’. Certainly we understand that the dog is running ‘in’ only until he reaches the middle of the forest, but this is in fact, all the way in. If the dog ran only half ‘in’, he would not yet be at the middle. Indeed if the dog ran halfway in and then ran halfway out, he would still be in the woods.
The editors noted, “It occurs to us that the dog’s continued presence there would be useful, in case something happens to that tree that we’ve been hearing about since high school physics — the one that falls when no one is in the forest and since there is no eardum to register sound waves, makes no noise. You know what a fine sense of hearing a dog has. Let him run halfway in (or as Mr. Baym argues, all the way), settle there, and keep an ear cocked for that tree.”
(from Robert L. Weber, ed., Science With a Smile, 1992.)
The cosmological argument basically says something like: I have parents, and my parents had parents, and so on in time back to the beginning of the universe, asking how the materials that made up The Big Bang got there in the first place? The theist says we must posit God as creator to start the chain of causes. In fact, this theistic answer is a God of the Gaps fallacy, like the ancient Greeks not knowing why the sun went across the sky so they imagined the God Helios driving the sun across the sky. There is a gap in scientific knowledge regarding a precise scientific consensus about the very beginning of our universe, but as scientific and mathematical knowledge grows we can see we are certainly not at the point where a reasonable answer is that fairies created the universe. Here is an important video explaining why:
It’s clear to every padawan that some things are wrong. For instance, it is wrong to steal from your parent’s wallet. Now, this seems to have nothing to do with whether there is a God or not, and yet some religious people say without God there can be no right or wrong. Why? They say god is in charge, so things are right or wrong because God says so. In other words, without God’s stamp of approval/disapproval, on whose authority, for instance, do we know that stealing is objectively wrong?
A long time ago, a thinker named Immanuel Kant explained this very well. He said we exist in such a way that our minds unconsciously give us the rule that we morally accompany all our actions, unlike lower animals such as dogs who, with the intellect of a two year old, are not morally responsible like we are. If the dog chews up the couch, the dog is not evil, because it doesn’t know any better. This is also true of certain mentally challenged people. This unconscious rule we follow makes human ethical experiences and judgments possible. A thinker after Kant named Schelling said it is our ability to be evil that is what is unique in humans among the animals. We have evolved in such a way that we all have a circle of friends, however small, that we act in a caring way toward because we like them and this is how we would want to be treated. This is the golden rule, which has been known and applied across place and time throughout human history, regardless of religious or secular context.
So, it’s not God saying so that makes morality possible, but rather the evolutionary combination of reason with the drive toward a circle of friends is eventually realized in the idea of universal human rights. We are all innately benevolent to some extent because we inherently like friends and understand you treat friends with kindness and are being a better friend if you play the game your friend wants to rather than the one you want to – and you’re being a bad friend if you steal your friend’s girlfriend.
Is it possible for a God to exist and act responsibly if he is not unconsciously obeying the same moral responsibility rule humans obey?
Can you make criteria to evaluate that the terrorist airplane attacks on 9’ll were evil, even though many Palestinians at the time felt they were tremendously good?
Across 4. Belief in living forever in a sky Disneyland 6. The rules of thinking 8. Believing/making predictions without evidence 10. The dog with all the questions 11. Thinking you can persuade god(s) to do stuff
Down
1 The love of wisdom
2 Searching for reasons/evidence
3 Magic and Monsters
5 Information on which to base belief
7 Believing someone/thing has successfully cast a magic spell
