God: A Beginner's Guide Ebook Epub

Caroline Ogden

• Publisher: Teach Yourself
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781444157994
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

This beginner's guide provides readers with the information they need to make informed decisions about frequently asked questions surrounding the existence of God - such as who is God and what do we mean when we say God? Key themes and ideas are presented clearly in jargon-free language.

1	Does God Exist?

For as far back as we can go, humanity has always felt the need to worship something or someone greater than itself. Most people would agree that this is instinctive, even if not everyone agrees that it is justifiable. People have constructed reasoned arguments for the existence of this being, which we shall call God, and these would seem the best starting point in any exploration of the nature of God, humanity’s experience of Him, how belief in God relates to other aspects of man’s life and problems that arise from that belief.

Note: Although much modern thinking supports the use of pronouns other than the masculine applied to God (as we shall see in Chapter 10), for simplicity and clarity we shall retain the traditional masculine form (with a capital H) in this book, along with the generic masculine applied to humanity.

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KEYWORDS

Circular argument: argument that uses as a proof the very thing it is trying to prove.

Moral sense: the capacity to distinguish virtue from vice; the admiration felt for good acts; one part of the reasoning faculty of man.

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Arguments for God’s existence come from many different grounds. There is the circular argument, that ‘God must exist, because one look at His universe shows that He is all-powerful and all-loving’. It will be obvious that, no matter how strongly felt, this argument takes as its evidence the very thing it has yet to prove! Equally, to argue from the existence of a moral sense would be to assume a moral nature to God, which is again to assume His existence. Others refuse to use logical conventions. The general definition of ‘faith’ even suggests that logical proofs cannot be used, or faith is destroyed. We will nevertheless look in detail at two of the oldest formally set out types of proof for the existence of God – the ontological argument of the influential Christian theologian St Anselm (1033–1109) and the cosmological argument of the philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274).

ST ANSELM’S ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT

The meaning of the word ‘Ontological’ has to do with the nature of being. The ontological argument for the existence of God attempts proof by analysing the concept of God. It is known as an a priori proof, meaning ‘prior to experience’, i.e. rational or by reason alone (as opposed to empirical or a posteriori, meaning ‘after experience’). This means that it takes God as a given and then tries to demonstrate His nature, rather than arguing that nature from what is seen.

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KEYWORDS

Ontological argument: attempt to prove God’s existence through analysis of the nature of the concept of God.

a priori: based on reason alone; not provable empirically.

a posteriori: based on reasoning from facts or particulars back to the general, from effects to their causes; inductive.

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In the first part of the argument, Anselm refers to the atheist who says ‘God does not exist’ and argues that, in order to deny God, the atheist must first have had a concept of God to deny: Anselm described God as ‘that than which no greater can be conceived’ but if the atheist then denies the existence of Anselm’s conception, he must first agree that definition, which means he must have ‘God’ in his mind.

Anselm goes on to explain that, for something to be ‘that than which no greater can be conceived’, it must exist in reality as well as in the mind or understanding, since to exist in both is greater than to exist in the mind alone. Therefore, if the atheist has ‘God’ in his mind, God must also be in reality. Otherwise, the atheist is conceiving of something, the definition of which he has agreed, yet at the same time denying that definition. And the definition itself would be false, since God would exist in the mind (of the atheist) but not in reality and therefore could not be ‘that than which no greater can be conceived’!

Anselm went on to state that God could not be conceived not to exist, for a being that can be thought not to exist is not as great as one that cannot be thought not to exist. In other words, existence is necessary to the idea of God.

This argument is circular, certainly, but it is known as a formally valid argument, meaning that neither the premises (or steps) of the argument nor its conclusion need to be true as long as the conclusion can be seen to logically follow from the premises. But Anselm was not trying to prove God’s existence to non-believers. He accepted that faith was a means of understanding and his argument merely set out to demonstrate that those without this faith were in error in denying God and that this could be proved logically. Much of the problem in these arguments for the modern mind arises from the idea current during Anselm’s time of the concept being identical with the object, so that ‘to have a thing in mind’ was meant rather more literally than we might realize!

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KEYWORDS

Formally valid: valid by being perfect in its form; even if the arguments are not true, they cannot help but lead to the conclusion.

Cosmological Argument: argument for God’s existence from the existence of caused things.

Coherence theory of truth: a statement is true if it fits with other statements or another outlook on the world.

Correspondence theory of truth: a statement is true if it fits with the way the world obviously is.

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Anselm’s argument belongs to what is known as the coherence theory of truth, i.e. something is true if it fits, or coheres, with the system (of belief or language etc.) in which it is found.

GAUNILO’S REPLY

Anselm’s argument was challenged by a contemporary, the monk Gaunilo, who argued that we often describe fictitious things without their actually existing and yet other people are able to understand that they are fictitious. He used the example of an imaginary island, perfect in every way and therefore the greatest that could be imagined, and said that it did not follow from this (a) that it actually existed, just because it was possible to have it in mind or (b) that the idea was any less perfect because it did not exist in reality.

ST THOMAS AQUINAS’S COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT

In his cosmological argument Aquinas sought to demonstrate God’s existence not because he considered it non-self-evident, but because he realized it was not a self-evident conclusion for ordinary people to draw from their experience. His arguments for God’s existence belong to the correspondence theory of truth, i.e. something is true if it corresponds to observable, objective reality. Aquinas’s argument is from the observable world and works from the effect back to the cause. He believed it was not possible to argue in the other direction since we could not presume to understand God’s nature or essence. His is thus an a posteriori (empirical argument). It is laid out as five proofs:

1 The Argument from Motion

Everything is in motion. Anything that is moved must be moved by something. The act of movement means that something changes from being in a state of potentiality (‘on the way’) to being in a state of actuality (‘arriving’). Only something already in an actual state could make this happen, just as only fire can make something actually hot, because it is itself actually hot. This ‘mover’ cannot be the same as the thing which it moves, as something cannot be simultaneously potential and actual. Nor can this ‘mover’ itself be moved by something else, or again it would not be actual. So it is known as the First Mover unmoved by anything before it, i.e. God.

2 The Argument from the Nature of Efficient Cause

Everything has an efficient cause of its being. Nothing can cause itself, or it would have to exist before itself. There may be a whole chain of effects, each of which causes the next one, but the first effect has a cause with no cause or effect before it. This is known as the First Efficient Cause, i.e. God.

3 The Argument from Possibility and Necessity

Everything in existence in nature – or the ‘created world’ – has the possibility, in fact the potential, to be or not be, e.g. everything alive now will not be so at a set point in the future. Things now existing as seeds have the potential to be plants, animals etc. But anything with the potential to be cannot be in existence at all times, and anything with the potential not to be must at some time equally not have been. Therefore, everything must not have been once, but in that case nothing could have come into being, which it obviously did, and so to avoid the problem of infinite regress already met in Arguments 1 and 2 (i.e. going back and back ad absurdum) there must be something whose existence is necessary to everything else, but which was never in a state of not-being and which has its own necessity, i.e. God.

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KEYWORDS

Infinite regress: the situation of a chain of events or effects going back to infinity without a first event or cause in the chain, where everything starts.

Teleological: argues from the apparent purpose behind the world, the seeming goal or completion of everything.

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4 The Argument from Gradation

This argument was later taken up by the French philosopher and scientist Renée Descartes (1596–1650), who said that, for us to recognize imperfection, there must be perfection to measure it against. Aquinas said that in nature some things are more good and true etc. and some less. However, to make these comparisons implies a maximum (or superlative) to compare them against, just as we say something is hotter the closer it comes to the absolute state of being hot (the ‘actual’ we talked about in Argument 1). Aquinas then quotes the fourth-century BC Greek philosopher Aristotle, who said if there is something that is greatest or truest, in other words the absolute best, it is also the greatest in being and if the maximum in any class is also the cause of everything that can be said to be within that particular class, as again the maximum of heat is fire and this is the cause of all hot things (we now know this to be the energy generated by friction, but the argument still stands), so there must be something that is the cause of every quality it has and that is shared by nature, including the state of being itself i.e. God.

5 The ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title
• Contents 
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Does God Exist?
• Chapter 2: Who is God? Immanence, Transcendence and Form
• Chapter 3: Who is God? The Religious Experience of Man (pre-Christian)
• Chapter 4: Who is God? The Religious Experience of Man (post-Christian)
• Chapter 5: What do we Mean by God? Language, Myth and Symbol
• Chapter 6: Problems of Reconciliation: Evil and Death
• Chapter 7: Theodicies: Following the Arguments
• Chapter 8: Issues for Belief in God Today: Science
• Chapter 9: Issues for Belief in God Today: Theology
• Chapter 10: Issues for Belief in God Today: Some other -isms
• Glossary
• Futher Reading
• Copyright