Word: argumentative
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...Cosmological Proof. The term applies technically to any argument for God through reflection upon the natural world. But most often "cosmological" refers to sweeping generalizations about ultimate origins and why the cosmos exists at all. Evolutionary schools of thought do not entertain such notions because they fall, by definition, outside what can be observed or tracked. If such questions are never asked, of course, they require no answer. Bertrand Russell once remarked in a BBC debate that the universe is "just there, and that's all." He was convinced that "all the labors of the ages, all the devotion...
Since the Enlightenment, though, philosophers have not been impressed. The great skeptic was David Hume (1711-76), who scoffed at the design argument because nature is so savage and wasteful that it might have been the work of "some infant deity who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance." Turned inside out, the proof is really a question: Could this intricate universe have evolved by pure trial and error? The last major philosopher to promote the argument, Britain's F.R. Tennant, wrote in 1934: "Presumably the world is comparable with a single throw of the dice. And common...
...existing and leaving behind absolutely nothing. An "efficient cause" is needed to explain "the actual existence here and now of a merely possible cosmos," something that preserves it in being and prevents it from being replaced by nothingness. Color that cause God. Philosopher Ross contends that this interesting argument was stated more successfully in the 13th century by his hero, Duns Scotus. Adler does not think...
Other scholars use what could be called the cumulative argument: they contemplate the comparative plausibility of various arguments and evidences using Adler's favored standard of judgment, the jury's proof "beyond a reasonable doubt." This permits atheists to avoid having to disprove God absolutely, which is as hard to do as prove his existence, and lets theists cite human phenomena that strict empiricism used to rule out. In The Existence of God (Oxford; $37.50), Richard Swinburne of England's Keele University concludes: "The experience of so many men in their moments of religious vision corroborates what...
...raises the problem, as old as the Book of Job, of evil. The existence of evil is no "knockdown disproof of an omnipotent and wholly good God," he says, but it does make God , improbable. Plantinga renovates the theist's classic reply to this: the free will argument. Examining whether a semifictional, corrupt Boston mayor would have taken smaller bribes in other "possible worlds," he argues that even an all-powerful God cannot create a world in which mayors can choose to take bribes and that also contains no evil...