Formal Arguments For the Existence of God

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 494.

To many people these experiences of Holy Being are self-authenticating, and they feel no need to inquire further. All human experience, however, is fallible. Mistakes of perception are everyday experiences, and false conceptions of the natural world, the earth, the heavenly bodies, and so forth have prevailed for thousands of years. It is therefore possible that the experience of Holy Being is illusory, and this possibility has led some believers to look for a rational basis for belief in God that

will confirm the experiential basis. Numerous attempts have been made to prove the reality of God. Medieval Scholastic theologian Saint Anselm argued that the very idea of a being than which nothing greater or more perfect can be conceived entails his existence, for existence is itself an aspect of perfection. Many philosophers have denied the logical validity of such a transition from idea to factual existence, but this ontological argument is still discussed. Thirteenth-century theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas rejected the ontological argument but proposed five other proofs of God's existence that are still officially accepted by the Roman Catholic church: The fact of change requires an agent of change; the chain of causation needs to be grounded in a first cause that is itself uncaused; the contingent facts of the world (facts that might not have been as they are) presuppose a necessary being; one can observe a gradation of things as higher and lower, and this points to a perfect reality at the top of the hierarchy; the order and design of nature demand as their source a being possessing the highest wisdom. Eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant rejected Aquinas's arguments but argued the necessity of God's existence as the support or guarantor of the moral life. These arguments for the reality of God have all been submitted to repeated and searching criticism, and they continue to be reformulated to meet the criticisms. It is now generally agreed that none of them constitutes a proof, but many believers would say that the arguments have a cumulative force, which, although still short of proof, amounts to a strong probability, especially in conjuction with the evidence of religious experience. Ultimately, however, belief in God is, like many other important beliefs, an act of faith—one that must be rooted in personal experience.

Оn 28 December 1999, just 3 days short of the twenty-fust century, more than 500 Iranians each pledged to sell a kidney and to donate the money to a fund to kill the author Salman Rushdie. Even though the Iranian government had moved away from the fatwah some months previously, for some Iranians the fatwah was permanent and needed to be carried out. Not all Iranians are Islamic fundamentalists, but it is interesting, in what are considered to be increasingly secular times, to witness the strength of a fundamentalist faith for so many millions. In recent years the Western media have cultivated a fear of Islamic fundamentalism, associating it with terrorism, kidnappings and bombings.