So far I have talked about basically two of the arguments - existence and contingency. That is "something exists" and "things are dependent on other things." Each of those claims, as demonstrated, becomes an argument for the existence of "God." But in each case all we have "proved" is that there is one thing upon which the universe depends for its existence. We call that thing "God" by definition, but what is it? Could it be simply a force, rather than a person? Well, perhaps force is the wrong term, because for there to be a force we have to have pre-existing laws etc. But could this "God" be a concept? Some would claim that concepts only exist if there is a mind to contemplate them. So is God pure mind?
We haven't gotten to the nature and attributes of God yet, merely the existence. I will be going into more proofs in future posts, and they will include constraints on the nature and attributes of God, but for now let's just say that by using logic and reason we can come to the conclusion that something we call God exists, without saying "what is God like?"
One of the arguments atheists use is "there are many religions, and they can't all be right, therefore why follow one that has only a 1 in N chance of being right?" However, it's not a random choice of what religion to pick, or what religion is true. Furthermore, two religions can be right on all the points on which they agree. It's only on points where they disagree that either one is wrong or both are wrong. The goal is to find out which religion is provably wrong and look at the remaining ones. Among the ones which are not provably false we then need to look at differences and see which of those are supported by evidence.
For instance, one of the things that popped out of our reasoning is that there is ONE God. Right away we have trimmed down our list of religions to six: Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism and Bahá'Ã. All other world religions, to my knowledge teach that God is not one thing. So I would claim that only those six have the possibility of being true, the others being false by contradicting reason.
It is a given that no religion has "complete" understanding of God, since a created being is not capable of comprehending everything (but maybe that claim is getting ahead of myself). It could also be true that no religion has a completely correct understanding of God. They could be correct on ninety nine points but misunderstand God on point one hundred. But even that doesn't support the atheist claims that there is no God, or that there is no evidence for God. Even if every popular religion is provably false, there is provably a God (which I guess would mean deists are the most correct because they acknowledge the existence of God but make no further claims). However, there are further claims we can safely make in reasoning about God.
The reason why I stopped to ponder this in the middle of my "proofs" is that the arguments to come all point to the nature of God. In other words, up to now, God could just be a concept or a mind or whatever you want to call it, but in the next arguments we see that God doesn't just exist, God has to have certain properties.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment