[Laughing Man]

The God Hypothesis

Argument for God- Anselm's Argument


1. God is, by definition, a being than which nothing greater can be conceived (imagined).
2. Existence in reality is greater than existence in the mind.
3. God must exist in reality, if God did not then God would not be that which nothing greater can be conceived (imagined).

Argument Against- Gasking's Argument

1. The creation of the world is the most marvelous achievement imaginable.
2. The merit of an achievement is the product of (a) its intrinsic quality, and (b) the ability of its creator.
3. The greater the disability (or handicap) of the creator, the more impressive the achievement.
4. The most formidable handicap for a creator would be non-existence.
5. Therefore if we suppose that the universe is the product of an existent creator we can conceive a greater being - namely, one who created everything while not existing.
6. Therefore God does not exist.


God, by definition, is (A) A being conceived as the perfect, omnipotent, omniscient originator and ruler of the universe, the principal object of faith and worship in monotheistic religions and (B) The force, effect, or a manifestation or aspect of this being.[1]

-All references to god will refer to the above definition. All references to god will not include Pantheism, Pandeism, Panendeism, Panentheism, or any such variants that may subject the definition of god to anything other than that which is stated above.

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The argument for whether god exists shall be one argument based on information already available:

A. Does such a being exist?

The history or background of such an argument does not need to be stated, further information on said topics can be found at the reader's discretion.


A. An omnipotent being is all powerful. If an omnipotent being is all powerful than it has the ability to achieve anything. Can such a being create an object it cannot move? Some uneducated believers many simply state "yes" without begging the answer or looking closely at the argument. This is an example of the omnipotence paradox and will be the basis for A. This question generates a dilemma. The being can either create a stone which it cannot lift, or it cannot create a stone which it cannot lift. If the being can create a stone that it cannot lift, then it seems that it can cease to be omnipotent. If the being cannot create a stone which it cannot lift, then it seems it is already not omnipotent.[2]

C.S Lewis in his book the "Problem of Pain" holds that the nature of the paradox is internal to the statement. To quote: "This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it', you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combination of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them to other words `God can'" (p. 18). In the end, "not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God". (p.18) 10
One could argue that there is reasonable doubt surrounding such a being. An example is the atheist's wager. The Atheist's Wager is an atheistic response to Pascal's Wager. While Pascal suggested that it is better to take the chance of believing in a God that might not exist rather than to risk losing infinite happiness by disbelieving in a god that does, the Atheist's Wager suggests that:

You should live your life and try to make the world a better place for your being in it, whether or not you believe in God. If there is no God, you have lost nothing and will be remembered fondly by those you left behind. If there is a benevolent God, he will judge you on your merits and not just on whether or not you believed in him.


This argument is not necessarily about why people believe in god and don't however for the sake consideration in the question of god:
"¢ You believe in God.
o If God exists, you go to heaven: your gain is infinite.
o If God does not exist, your loss (the investment in your mistaken belief) is finite and therefore negligible.
"¢ You do not believe in God.
o If God exists, you go to hell: your loss is infinite.
o If God does not exist, your gain is finite and therefore negligible.

Also there has arisen the argument for nonbelief. The argument from nonbelief, also known as the argument from divine hiddenness, is a recently-developed argument against the existence of God. Summarized, it states that if God exists (and wants humankind to know so) he would have brought about a situation in which everyone believes in him, but there are unbelievers, so God does not exist. It is similar to the classic argument from evil in that it affirms inconsistency between the world which is and the world which would be if God had certain desires combined with the power to see them through.

The argument was the subject of J.L. Schellenberg's 1993 book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason and has been addressed by other philosophers, including Theodore Drange.
A formal presentation of the argument is as follows:[4]

1. If there is a God, he is perfectly loving.
2. If a perfectly loving God exists, reasonable nonbelief does not occur.
3. Reasonable nonbelief occurs.
4. No perfectly loving God exists (from 2 and 3).
5. Hence, there is no God (from 1 and 4).

Theodore Drange proposed a version of the nonbelief argument in 1996. He considers the distinction between culpable and inculpable nonbelief to be completely irrelevant, and tries to argue that the mere existence of nonbelief is evidence against the existence of God. A formal presentation of the argument is as follows:[3]

1. If God exists, God:
1. wants all humans to believe he exists before they die;
2. can bring about a situation in which all humans believe he exists before they die;
3. does not want anything which would conflict with and be at least as important as his desire for all humans to believe he exists before they die; and
4. always acts in accordance with what he most wants.
2. If God exists, all humans would believe so before they die (from 1).
3. But not all humans believe God exists before they die.
4. Therefore, God does not exist (from 2 and 3).

To continue, yet another argument exists that disproves whether god. The argument from inconsistent revelations, also known as the avoiding the wrong hell problem, is an argument against the existence of God. It asserts that it is unlikely that God exists because many theologians and faithful adherents have produced conflicting and mutually exclusive revelations. Since a person not privy to revelation must either accept it or reject it based solely upon the authority of its proponent, and there is no way for a mere mortal to resolve these conflicting claims by investigation, it is prudent to reserve one's judgment. The argument appears, among other places, in Voltaire's Candide and Philosophical Dictionary.

This argument against God can be seen as the reverse of Pascal's Wager and frequently arises as an objection to it. The Wager invites one to accept the existence of God in the absence of proof as the best strategy because the alternate outcome for disbelief is eternal damnation in Hell. The argument from inconsistent revelations states that, given the content of the proposed revelations, acceptance of one entails rejection of another; Pascal's Wager gives no assurance that a person has in fact made the safest choice. In his Pensees philosophiques, Denis Diderot stated this objection to the Wager by observing that "An imam could reason the same way."

In mathematical terms, it states that, if there are a number (n) of inconsistent faiths one could believe in, the probability (p) of having chosen to practice the correct one by making Pascal's Wager is represented as p = 1 / n. Therefore, if there are five mutually exclusive faiths, there is an 80% chance that an incorrect religion was chosen and the believer will go to the correct religion's Hell rather than its Heaven.

Christians believe that Jesus is the savior of the world and the son of God; Jews believe just as strongly that he is not. Similarly, Muslims believe that the Qur'an was divinely authored, while Jews and Christians do not. There are many examples of such contrasting views; indeed, opposing fundamental beliefs (schisms) exist even within each major religion. Acceptance of any one of these religions thus requires a rejection of the others, and when faced with these competing claims in the absence of a personal revelation, it is not possible to decide amongst them. Were a personal revelation to be granted to a nonbeliever, the same problem of confusion would develop in each new person the believer shared the revelation with.

Believers have a number of stratagems to counter this argument. It assumes, for example, that none of them make verifiable predictions about what can be found in history or science. The presence of a testable proposition in a revelation may provide a way to assess the credentials of the prophet who claims to speak for a deity; an error about an inter-subjectively demonstrable fact casts doubt on the remaining propositions that cannot be verified.

Richard Dawkins has also recently created his own opinion of Gods existence in the form of the 747 gambit. It was introduced by Richard Dawkins in chapter 4 "Why there almost certainly is no God" of his book The God Delusion. Dawkins offers it as a counter-argument to the modern form of the argument from design.

Dawkins summarizes his argument as follows.[5] The references to "crane" and "skyhook" are ideas from Dennett's book Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the centuries, has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.

2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. In the case of a man-made artefact such as a watch, the designer really was an intelligent engineer. It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or a wing, a spider or a person.

3. The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable. We need a "crane" not a "skyhook," for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity.

4. The most ingenious and powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Darwin and his successors have shown how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings. We can now safely say that the illusion of design in living creatures is just that - an illusion.

5. We don't yet have an equivalent crane for physics. Some kind of multiverse theory could in principle do for physics the same explanatory work as Darwinism does for biology. This kind of explanation is superficially less satisfying than the biological version of Darwinism, because it makes heavier demands on luck. But the anthropic principle entitles us to postulate far more luck than our limited human intuition is comfortable with.

6. We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. But even in the absence of a strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one, the relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the anthropic principle, self-evidently better than the self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer.

The final argument against god is that of free will. The argument from free will is an argument against the existence of an omniscient God which contends that omniscience and free will are incompatible, and that any conception of God which incorporates both properties is therefore inherently contradictory.
While Maimonides made the argument in terms of good and evil actions, it can more generally be applied to all free-will actions by individuals. In modern terms, the argument goes as follows [11]

1. The Christian God is defined as a personal being who knows everything. According to Christians, personal beings have free will.

2. In order to have free will, you must have more than one option, each of which is avoidable. This means that before you make a choice, there must be a state of uncertainty during a period of potential: you cannot know the future. Even if you think you can predict your decision, if you claim to have free will, you must admit the potential (if not the desire) to change your mind before the decision is final.

3. A being who knows everything can have no "state of uncertainty." It knows its choices in advance.

4. A being that knows its choices in advance has no potential to avoid its choices, and therefore lacks free will.

5. Since a being that lacks free will is not a personal being, a personal being who knows everything cannot exist.

6. Therefore, the Christian God does not exist.

The argument is related to the well-known issue of Theological Fatalism, which is about whether God's foreknowledge of human actions imply that humans have no freewill[6][7] Maimonides stated a version of the problem as follows:[8]

"Does God know or does He not know that a certain individual will be good or bad? If thou sayest 'He knows', then it necessarily follows that [that] man is compelled to act as God knew beforehand he would act, otherwise God's knowledge would be imperfect...."[9]

One can follow that God is an idea meant to create a higher sense of morality. That in his absence the world would become so solipsist that purpose would not exist. A nihilist view perhaps but one can not argue against the facts. The facts of imperfection that seem to counter act against religion are the basis for living a world without war and plagiarized text that claim to be divine.

Argument:
1.An omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent creator God would create organisms that have optimal design.
2.Organisms have features that are suboptimal.
3.Therefore, God either did not create these organisms or is not omnipotent, omniscient or omnibenevolent.


Examples.
"¢In the African locust, nerve cells start in the abdomen but connect to the wing. This leads to unnecessary use of materials.


"¢In the human female, a fertilized egg can implant into the fallopian tube, cervix or ovary rather than the uterus causing an ectopic pregnancy. The existence of a cavity between the ovary and the fallopian tube could indicate a flawed design in the female reproductive system. Prior to modern surgery, ectopic pregnancy invariably caused the deaths of both mother and baby. Even in modern times, in almost all cases, the pregnancy must be aborted to save the life of the mother.
"¢In the human female, the birth canal passes through the pelvis. The prenatal skull will deform to a surprising extent. However, if the baby's head is significantly larger than the pelvic opening, the baby cannot be born naturally. Prior to the development of modern surgery (caesarean section), such a complication would lead to the death of the mother, the baby or both. Other birthing complications such as breech birth are worsened by this position of the birth canal. Birth would hypothetically be easier if the birth canal passed through the front of the abdomen.
"¢In the human male, testes develop initially within the abdomen. Later during gestation, they migrate through the abdominal wall into the scrotum. This causes two weak points in the abdominal wall where hernias can later form. Prior to modern surgical techniques, complications from hernias including intestinal blockage, gangrene, etc., usually resulted in death.
"¢In the human male, a portion of the urethra is surrounded by the prostate gland. If the prostate gland is enlarged for any reason, the urethra becomes impassable, making urination difficult and painful and in extreme cases impossible. Prior to modern surgical techniques, inability to urinate usually resulted in death.
"¢Barely used nerves and muscles (e.g. Plantaris muscle) that are missing in part of the human population and are routinely harvested as spare parts if needed during operations.
"¢Intricate reproductive devices in orchids, apparently constructed from components commonly used for different purposes in other flowers.
"¢The use by pandas of their enlarged radial sesamoid bones in a manner similar to how other creatures use thumbs.
"¢The pointless existence of the appendix in humans, also the corresponding potentially fatal condition of appendicitis. The appendix, which is highly developed in herbivores, is meant to aid in the bacterial digestion of cellulose. Since people use fire and heat to cook now the appendix has become useless. (It also been proposed that the appendix is involved in development of the immune system within the first year after birth, but subsequently has no function. However some people have congenital absence of their appendix without any reports of impaired immune system function.)
"¢The existence of unnecessary wings in flightless birds, e.g. ostriches.
"¢The route of the recurrent laryngeal nerve is such that it travels from the brain to the larynx by looping around the aortic arch. This same configuration holds true for many animals, in the case of the giraffe this results in about twenty feet of extra nerve.
"¢Portions of DNA - termed "junk" DNA - that do not appear to serve any purpose.
"¢The dystrophin gene is the largest ever found in nature - 2.4 millions of DNA base pairs; or 0.1 percent of the human genome. Its only known function is to inhibit muscular dystrophy; and such a large gene is highly susceptible to harmful mutations.
"¢The prevalence of congenital diseases and genetic disorders such as Huntington's Disease, and the inability for DNA to self-repair, leading to poor genetic performance, hereditable malformation and eventual death.
"¢The common malformation of the human spinal column, leading to scoliosis, sciatica and congenital misalignment of the vertebrae (vertebral subluxation)
"¢Photosynthetic plants that reflect green light, even though the sun's peak output is at this wavelength. A more optimal system of photosynthesis would use the entire solar spectrum, thus resulting in black plants.
"¢The existence of the pharynx, a passage used for both ingestion and respiration, with the consequent drastic increase in the risk of choking.
"¢The structure of humans' (as well as all mammals') eyes. The retina is 'inside out'. The nerves and blood vessels lie on the surface of the retina instead of behind it as is the case in many invertebrate species. This arrangement forces a number of complex adaptations and gives mammals a blind spot. See Evolution of the eye, section "Other developments" for an explanation why the octopus' eye is better constructed than ours. Six muscles move the eye when three would suffice.
"¢Crowded teeth and poor sinus drainage, as human faces are significantly flatter than those of other primates and humans share the same tooth set. This results in a number of problems, most notably with wisdom teeth.
"¢Almost all animals and plants synthesize their own vitamin C, but humans cannot because the gene for this enzyme is defective (Pseudogene ΨGULO). Lack of vitamin C results in scurvy and eventually death. Defective vitamin synthesis pathways are a hallmark of "higher" animals - of which many are predators - because the prey accumulates vitamins that stems either from the eaten plants or are self-synthesized in the captured individual. Thus, higher animals are mostly unable to return to a purely "vegetarian" lifestyle; while conservation of such pathway genes is of no apparent cost to the animal.














Notes

1.God. (n.d.). The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Retrieved April 02, 2007, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/God

2."Omnipotence paradox." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 2 Apr 2007, 09:54 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 2 Apr 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Omnipotence_pa radox&oldid=119685482>.
3. ^ Drange, Theodore (1996). The Arguments From Evil and Nonbelief. Retrieved on 2007-01-13.

4. ^ Schellenberg, John L. (1993). Divine Hiddeness and Human Reason. Cornell University Press, p. 83. ISBN 0801427924.

5. ^ The God Delusion, p. 157-8

6 ^ The Freewill Argument for the Nonexistence of God by Dan Barker Freethought Today, August 1997 [1]

7 ^ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Foreknowledge and Free Will

8 ^ Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Foreknowledge and Free Will

9 ^ The Eight Chapters of Maimonides on Ethics (Semonah Perak.im), edited, annotated, and translated with an Introduction by Joseph I. Gorfinkle, pp. 99-100. (New York: AMS Press), 1966.

10 ^ The Problem of Pain, Clive Staples Lewis, 1944 MacMillan

11 ^ Though he was not arguing against the existence of God, and his argument is now seen as a classic example of the Modal Fallacy see the article in the Internet Encycolpedia of Philosophy