REEDI

IS THERE REALLY GOD? IS IT POSSIBLE TO KNOW GOD? HOW CAN ONE BE

CERTAIN OF THE WILL OF GOD?
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION IS NOT:

• BELIEVING WHATEVER YOUR PARENTS TAUGHT YOU.

- Because it doesn’t prove anything of your religious belief. If how you are raise to
prove something about religious belief then every religion and therefore no religion be true.
If how you are raise can get you a reason that you own certain belief but it’s just nothing
about it whatever its true.
• THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE
- Because you can’t use what is written in the book to prove the truth of the book. You
need outside evidence.
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION IS NOT:

- there is also a whole area of scholarship devoted to understanding the Bible by

considering the time and place and when was it written and such study can be very helpful
in understanding certain things about religion. But it doesn’t help us here.
• RELIGIOUS ANTHROPOLOGY
• RELIGIOUS SOCIOLOGY
• PSYCHOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING OF OUR REASONS FOR RELIGIOUS
BELIEF.
These are all wonderful things that can and self study but they are not what we are studying
here. What we are doing is considering whether we can offer an argument in support of our
belief in God’s existence.
ANSELM OF CANTERBURY

11th century French, monk, Anselm of Canterbury

• He offered a deductive argument for the existence of God based on what he understood
the nature of God’s being.
• His argument is known ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT
• Anselm thought God is the best possible thing we can imagine THE BEST THING.
• Awesome, cool, most amazing, great, and wonderful thing you can imagine and whatever
we can think enough, Anselm said that God is better.
“[GOD IS] THAT THAN WHICH NO GREATER CAN BE WHAT DOES
CONCIEVED”
THAT MEAN?
• According to Anselm, God must exist.
• After all, he pointed out there just two ways in which something can exist only in our
minds and be strictly imaginary like Santa or Unicorns or it can exist in our minds but
also in reality like pizza and horses something that we can imagine but that’s also real.
• And some pointed out and he doesn’t to be right this that any good thing would be better
if it existed in reality as well as in our minds
• Well, Anselm thought so too and from there he believed he could prove God’s existence
• Imagining the greatest thing possible
there can’t be anything better therefore
God has to exist in imagination and in
reality and some was sure that he had
done it deductively proven God’s
existence in a way that was immune to
error here it is no more laid out as a
philosophical argument.
IF DEFINE GOD AS THE
GREATEST THING THAT WE
CAN CONJURE UP IN OUR
MINDS, THE ONLY THING THAT
COULD POSSIBLY BE GREATER
THAT HIM WOULD BE . . . A
REAL VERSION!
• God is the greatest thing we can think of. Things can exist only in our imaginations, or
they can also exist in reality.
• Things that exist in reality are always better that things that exist only in our
imaginations.
• If God existed only in our imaginations, he wouldn’t be the greatest thing that we can
think of, because God in reality would be better.
• Therefore, God must exist in reality.
PART 111

• Nothing gets people talking like proving the existence of God.

• Anselm of Canterbury did. He claimed, in the 11th century, to have come up with deductive proof of
God’s existence, through what we now know as the ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT. And if there was
such thing as a socialnetwork od medieval Christian philosophers back then, it was positively abuzz
with the news. For long time. Because, almost 200 years later, Italian theologian and philosopher
Thomas Aquinas encountered Anselm’s argument. Bur, like many others, he just didn’t buy it.
Aquinas did believe in God. It was just that, as a philosopher, he felt that it was important to have
evidence for your beliefs. He knew what if he was going to dismiss Anselm’s argument, he’d need to
come up with something better. So, he set to construct five arguments that would prove God’s
existence, once and for all.
THOMAS AQUINAS

• Aparantly, he was concerned one wasn’t to do it, so he figured that, out of five, one was
bound to stick.
 THOMAS AQUINAS

AQUINAS’ 5 PROOFS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

1. Argument from motion

2. Argument from causation COSMOLOGICAL

ARGUMENTS
3. Argument from contingency

4.Argument from degrees

5. Teleological Argument
• His first four arguments are known together as the cosmological arguments, as they seek
to prove God’s existence through what he argued were necessary facts about the
universe.
• Now we reexamined these first four arguments of Thomas Aquinas—and really try to
understand them. And then we will consider their merits…and their weaknesses.
• Maybe the most striking thing about the cosmological arguments of Aquinas, at least to
modern eyes, is that some of them are firmly based in the natural world. Even though he
lived in a pretty unscientific time, Aquinas argued for existence of God through his
understanding of science, and with the help of what he thought was physical evidence.
• For example, the first of his cosmological arguments is known as the Argument from
Motion.
AQUINAS’ 5 PROOFS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
1. ARGUMENT FROM MOTION
-We currently live in a world in
1. Argument from motion
which things are moving.
Movement is caused by movers.
(Things that cause motion.)
Everything that’s moving must
have been set into motion by
something else that was moving.
Something must have started the
motion in the first place.
FOR INSTANCE

• The Classic example here is a row of

dominos, each one being pushed by the
one behind it, but the dominos can’s go
back forever – the fingers that puts them in
motion is GOD.
INFINITE REGRESS
Noun / in.fi.nite re.gress

• In chain of reasoning, the evidence for each

point along the chain relies on the existence of
something even further back, and so on, with
no starting point.
• In case of physical motion, Aquinas wanted to trace the cause of the movement he saw in
the world all the way back to its beginning. And he figured there MUST have been a
beginning.
• Otherwise, for him, it would be like watching these blocks fall, and being told that
nothing ever pushed over the first block. Instead, they had always been falling down
forever backward into eternity. There must have been a time when nothing was in motion,
Aquinas thought, and there must’ve been a static being that started the motion. And that
being, according to Aquinas, is God – Unmoved Mover.
1. ARGUMENTS FROM MOTION
• Objects are in motion.
• Everything in motion was put in motion by something else, there can’t be an infinite
regress of movers.
• So there must be a first mover, itself unmoved, and that is God.
AQUINAS’ 5 PROOFS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
2. ARGUMENT FROM
CAUSATION
1. Argument from motion
Some things are cause.
Anything that’s caused to be caused
2. Argument from Causation
by something else
(since nothing causes itself.)
There can’t be an infinite regress of
causes.

So there must have been a first

causer, itself uncaused, and that is
God.
• But Aquinas said, again: It can’t go back forever. There had to be a First Thing that
started off the chain of causes and effects. And that Thing is God.
AQUINAS’ 5 PROOFS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

1. Argument from motion

2. Argument from Causation

3. Argument from Contingency

NECESSARY BEING
• That includes you. You do exist, but you could not have.
• If you had never been born, the world would go on. And yes, things would be different –
we’ve all seen It’s a Wonderful life – but the world would go on.
• Instead, your existence is merely contingent on the existence of other things. In your case,
you only exist because a certain sperm met a certain egg and swapped some genetic
information. You’re basically fluke.
 WE CAN’T HAVE A WORLD WHRE EVERYTHING IS
CONTINGENT, BECAUSE THEN—BY DEFIBNATION—
IT ALL COULD EASILY HAVE NEVER EXISTED. • A Being that has always existed, that always
exist, and that can’s not existed.

NECESSARY BEING
 3. ARGUMENT FROM CONTINGENCY
There are contingent things,
Contingent things can cause other contingent things,
But there can’t only be contingent things.
Because that would mean that there’s an infinite regress of
contingency, and a possibility that nothing might have existed/
An infinite regress is impossible.

So there must be at least one necessary thing,

And that is God.
• This one is built on the idea that we simply need a measuring stick in order to understand
the value of things.
• Good/bad, big/small, hot/cold – none of these concepts can exist in isolation.
• For instance, if you go our for a walk and you see an animal, and it’s like this big, that
animal would be a small side if it turned out to be a dog. But if it were a rat, that would be
HUGE. How do we know?
• Because we gauge the size of things in terms of other things.
• Because it’s at the top – we know that there are grades
lower than an A, but nothing higher.
• And Aquinas thought that all of our value concepts would
just be floating randomly in space if there weren’t some
anchor – something that defined the value of everything
else by being perfect – and that, again, is God.
AQUINAS’ 5 PROOFS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

1. Argument from motion

4. ARGUMENT FROM DEGREES
2. Argument from Causation Properties come in degrees.
In order for there to be degrees of perfection, there
3. Argument from Contingency must be something perfect against which
everything else is measured.
4. Argument from Degrees
God is the pinnacle of perfection.
 4. ARGUMENT FROM DEGREES
Properties come in degrees.
In order for there to be degrees of perfection, there must be
something perfect against which everything else is measured.

God is the pinnacle of perfection.