Philosophy of Religion: Arguments, Evil, Experience, Miracle, Afterlife
This domain examines whether belief in God is rationally defensible. You must reconstruct arguments in their strongest form, identify the type of argument (a posteriori or a priori, deductive or inductive), and evaluate premises rather than dismissing conclusions.
Arguments for belief
- Cosmological: Aquinas' ways of motion, efficient causation and contingency; the Kalam form (al-Ghazali, Craig) - whatever begins to exist has a cause. Objections: infinite regress, fallacy of composition, and the gap between a first cause and the God of worship.
- Teleological: Paley's watch; Hume's objections (weak analogy, unique universe, no experience of world-making); Darwinian explanation; fine-tuning and the anthropic principle.
- Ontological: Anselm's that-than-which-nothing-greater; Gaunilo's perfect island; Kant's claim that existence is not a predicate; Plantinga's modal version.
- Moral: Kant's postulates, Newman's conscience, Lewis.
The problem of evil
Mackie's logical problem: omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence and evil cannot co-exist. Replies: Augustine's privation theory and free will; Plantinga's free-will defence, which needs only a possible world with free creatures and no evil; Hick's Irenaean soul-making. Rowe's evidential problem concerns gratuitous suffering and survives the logical defence.
Experience, miracle, afterlife
- James's marks: ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, passivity. Swinburne's principles of credulity and testimony; objections from conflicting claims and neuroscience.
- Hume: a miracle is a transgression of a law of nature, and no testimony can outweigh the uniform experience of those laws. Critics reply that this begs the question and ignores the character of witnesses. Wiles argues miracles are inconsistent with a God of reliable order.
- Afterlife: Platonic and Cartesian dualism versus monism; bodily resurrection; Hick's replica theory; karma and rebirth; the verification objection.
Worked example
"Evil disproves God." Assess. Formalise the logical version, then deploy Plantinga: the set is not contradictory once free will is possible. Distinguish moral from natural evil. Then concede Rowe's evidential force and test soul-making against the intensity and distribution of suffering. Verdict: the logical version fails, the evidential version remains a serious difficulty.
Traps
- Calling an argument invalid when you actually reject a premise.
- Confusing a defence (possibility) with a theodicy (justification of God's ways).
- Quoting Hume's definition without evaluating his argument.
- Treating near-death experiences as proof of survival.