And since science, until the late 18th, and 19th centuries, hadn't produced any good explanation of how things began, religion still had an important place in explaining how the world was the way it was.
God's role as an explanation for the way things are took a serious knock from the sciences of geology and evolution. Geologists discovered that the earth was hundreds of millions of years old, and not just 6, years old as was generally believed at that time. They showed that the rocks that make up the earth had been laid down in layers at different times; a deeper layer by and large came from an earlier time than a shallow layer.
In each layer were fossils that showed that different species of animals had lived in different eras. Not only were many no longer in existence but some didn't appear until relatively recent times. This was incompatible with the idea that God completely created the world in 6 days and so scientists with a faith came up with another compromise - the 6 days of biblical creation were a poetic way of describing long periods of millions of years during which God worked on the world.
The theory of evolution explains the variety of life forms on earth without any reference to God. It says that from very simple beginnings, processes of genetic variation and selection i. These processes are not directed by any being, they are just the way the world works; God is unnecessary. No intervening spirit watches lovingly over the affairs of nature though Newton's clock-winding god might have set up the machinery at the beginning of time and then let it run.
No vital forces propel evolutionary change. And whatever we think of God, his existence is not manifest in the products of nature. Some philosophers think that religious language doesn't mean anything at all, and therefore that there's no point in asking whether God exists. They would say that a sentence like "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" is neither true or false, it's meaningless; in the same way that "colourless green ideas sleep furiously" is meaningless.
Logical Positivists argued that a sentence was meaningless if it wasn't either true or false, and they said that a sentence would only be true or false if it could be tested by an experiment, or if it was true by definition. Since you couldn't verify the existence of God by any sort of "sense experience", and it wasn't true by definition eg in the way "a triangle has 3 sides" is true , the logical positivists argued that it was pointless asking the question since it could not be answered true or false.
These particular philosophers didn't only say that religious talk was meaningless, they thought that much of philosophical discussion, metaphysics for example, was meaningless too. This philosophical theory is no longer popular, and attention has returned to the issues of what "God" means and whether "God" exists. We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express - that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject is as being false.
Ayer actually preferred a weaker version of the theory, because since no empirical proof could be totally conclusive, almost every statement about the world would have to be regarded as meaningless. A proposition is said to be verifiable, in the strong sense of the term, if, and only if, its truth could be conclusively established in experience. But it is verifiable, in the weak sense, if it is possible for experience to render it probable. For if the existence of such a god were probable, then the proposition that he existed would be an empirical hypothesis.
And in that case it would be possible to deduce from it, and other empirical hypotheses, certain experiential propositions which were not deducible from those other hypotheses alone. But in fact this is not possible For to say that "God Exists" is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false.
They ask whether 'religion' is actually a name given to various psychological drives, rather than a response to the existence of God or gods. These beliefs are strongly held because they enable human beings to cope with some of their most basic fears. Atheists argue that since religion is just a psychological fantasy, human beings should abandon it so that they can grow to respond appropriately to deal with the world as it is.
One of his theories was that religion stems from the individual's experience of having been a helpless baby totally dependent on its parents.
The infant sees its parents as all-powerful beings who show it great love and satisfy all its needs. This experience is almost identical to the way human beings portray their relationship with God.
Freud also suggested that childhood experiences caused people to have very complex feelings about their parents and themselves, and religion and religious rituals provide a respectable mechanism for working these out. Freud also described religion as a mass-delusion that reshaped reality to provide a certainty of happiness and a protection from suffering.
Some people think that religions and belief in God fulfil functions in human society, rather than being the result of God actually existing. Ludwig Feuerbach was a 19th century German philosopher who proposed that religion was just a human being's consciousness of the infinite. He said that human ideas about God were no more than the projection of humanity's ideas about man onto an imaginary supernatural being.
Emile Durkheim , a French sociologist, thought that religion was something produced by human society, and had nothing supernatural about it. He believed that religion existed, but he did not agree that the reality that lay behind it was the same reality that believers thought existed. Religion helped people to form close knit groups, in which they could find a place in society. Religious rituals created mental states in those taking part which were helpful to the group.
To put it another way; religious rituals do not do anything other than strengthen the beliefs of the group taking part and reinforce the collective consciousness. Durkheim thought that this was enough to give people a feeling that there was something supernatural going on. Since it is in spiritual ways that social pressure exercises itself, it could not fail to give men the idea that outside themselves there exist one or several powers, both moral and, at the same time, efficacious, upon which they depend.
Durkheim said that religious beliefs divided experiences into the profane and the sacred - the profane were the routine experiences of everyday life, while the sacred were beyond the everyday and likely to inspire reverence. Objects could become sacred, not because of any inherent supernatural resonance but because the group fixed certain 'collective ideals' on an object. Karl Marx thought that religion was an illusion, with no real God or supernatural reality standing in the background.
Religion was a force that stopped human societies from changing. Marx believed that religion was a social institution, and reflected and sustained the particular society in which it flourished.
He went further. The philosophical argument that is most tricky, or hardest to refute: in other words, the argument for God that has the greatest degree of sophistry.
This used to include the Ontological Arguments , which briefly stymied even Bertrand Russell. But nobody can see that Bear, for he is the Ursine Ground of Being: ineffable and undetectable even though his Bearness permeates and supports everything.
Without that Bear, the universe could not function, much less exist. And this, in fact, is what Hart has apparently done in his new book. God is what grounds the existence of every contingent thing, making it possible, sustaining it through time, unifying it, giving it actuality. God is the condition of the possibility of anything existing at all.
Reread that paragraph, particularly the last line, and then see if you can explain it to one of your friends. And there is not an iota of evidence for such a God, so on what ground should we believe it? Hart claims that this is the conception of God that has prevailed throughout most of history, but I seriously doubt that.
Aquinas, Luther, Augustine: none of those people saw God in such a way. My God is just sitting there, watching over us all, but only for his amusement. Perhaps the swathes of space strung with gossamer nebulae serve some aesthetic purpose, beauty wrought on an inhuman scale.
Perhaps God values rocks and cosmic dust more highly than humans. The problem with these rival explanations is that, as they stand, they are unsatisfying. They hint at reasons why God might create tiny humans in a gargantuan place but are a million miles away from fully explaining why. The weight of galaxies, and the press of years, seem to sweep us towards atheism. Portsmouth Climate Festival — Portsmouth, Portsmouth. Edition: Available editions United Kingdom.
Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in. I wrote novels about Albert Einstein and quantum theory and the mysteries of the cosmos. And ideas about God keep popping up in my books. Should scientists even try to answer questions about the purpose of the universe?
Why does it seem to follow mathematical laws, and are those laws inevitable? And, perhaps most important, why does the universe exist? Why is there something instead of nothing? He observed that all worldly objects can change from potential to actuality—an ice cube can melt, a child can grow—but the cause of that change must be something besides that object warm air melts the ice cube, food nourishes the child. The history of the universe can thus be seen as an endless chain of changes, but Aquinas argued that there must be some transcendent entity that initiated the chain, something that is itself unchanging and that already possesses all of the properties that worldly objects can come to possess.
And unlike all worldly objects, the transcendent entity is necessary—it must exist. Aquinas defined that entity as God. This reasoning came to be known as the cosmological argument, and many philosophers elaborated on it. They developed the math independently. Both Leibniz and Newton considered themselves natural philosophers, and they freely jumped back and forth between science and theology.
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