Lay out the standard atheistic perspectives: materialism/atomism, naturalism, empiricism, and moral indignation. Students generally will be Christians, so the purpose is to see the existence of God as a problem.
- Hume: Dialogue on Natural Religion
- Lucretius:
- Russel Why I am not a Christian
- Dostoevsky: Ivan’s challenge
Agnosticism and fideism are two sides of the same coin. Atheists and theists hold that we can answer the question of God’s existence rationally, agnostics and fideists dissent. This raises the problem of the nature of faith, belief, and reason.
- Protagoras
- Pascal
- Kant
- Kierkegaard
- William James?
- Martin Luther?
In order to affirm the existence of God, we have to make a transition from the order of sense and common sense to the order of reason.
So long as reality consists of mind-independent corpuscular stuff, Lucretius is right. So long as reality is what could be known if only we could get a direct look, not mediated by the senses, Hume or Kant is right.
As Plato’s cave emphasizes, we naturally begin on the level of common sense “reality”. Until we seek intelligible causes we remain ignorant, but there is a path that leads beyond common experience and opinion.
As Augustine’s intellectual conversion (i.e., his turn to neoplatonism from emphasizes, a personal transition is required wherein we consciously move from thinking of everything as a body (an object “out there”) to intelligible reality. As Augustine realized in his intellectual conversion, reality is what can be imaged, or God would be an impressive body. And the self as intelligent has an immaterial core.
As Aristotle recognized, this transition to intellect entails a process of learning and a mastery of rigorous disciplines, which begin from our experiences of the physical world and ascend toward separate substance.
Finally, Aquinas synthesizes the matter: material reality corresponds to three separate intellectual operations: matter:form:existence::experience:apprehension:judgment. This synthesis is crucial to both his account of human nature, the structure of the world, and the nature of God.
Thus, to approach the question of the existence of God, students must make an intellectual conversion. This means grasping reality not as “objects out there”, but as what is understood when one correctly explains the world. It means grasping ourselves as intellectual, as moving from a desire to know toward a limit of total knowledge through highways and byways of explanatory intellectual disciplines. Only when reality is grasp as what is understood when one asks questions and answers them correctly, only when the self is grasped as a source for questions that end only in complete knowledge, and only when God is grasped as both the complete answer and complete act of understanding can one approach the question of the existence of God.
- Plato’s Republic, the cave and the divided line
- Aristotle’s metaphysics Bk. 1
- Augustine’s Confessions
The general structure of a priori arguments can be approached from the side of subjectivity or objectivity.
Subjectivity is a bit more intuitive. We are capable of unlimited wonder, a desire to know which has no limit. (Proof: we can ask what is beyond our desire to know.) But our attainment of knowledge is limited. Yet, just as the sequence 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 ... heads toward the limit 1, so too our knowledge heads toward a limit. This is a single act of understanding which leaves no unanswered questions. It is an unrestricted act of understanding.
Now, whatever is grasped by that act of understanding cannot be limited. If it were, there remain further questions beyond that limit (which is a contradiction). Yet the act of understanding and the content of that act of understanding cannot be distinguished, since neither can posses anything not already possessed by the other. Hence, there is a single intellectual act which both understands everything and explains why everything exists and what it is for.
This is just the flip side of traditional a posteriori arguments. From contingency, for example, we want to know why the universe exists. It is contingent insofar as it poses questions it cannot, in principle answer. Now if we deny that reality is what is grasped in an explanation, and think of it as what is mind-independent stuff, we think of existence as just brute “being there”. And then our assumption that contingencies must have explanations is arbitrary and deniable. However, if reality is the totality of what can be explained, if it is in fact exactly what is grasped in an explanation, then it follows that things must be explicable or they are nothing.
From this ground, all the traditional arguments follow: there must be an explanation for all the particular changes in the world, for the existence of things, for contingencies, for values, and for purposes. These are variations on questions like “why?”, “whence?”, “what for?” taken to their absolute limit. Once one makes an intellectual conversion, one is committed to the view that to every well posed question there is an answer (save for moral evil), and to every genuine problem there is a solution.
- Aquinas, De Ente et Essentia, ST
- Leibniz’ Contingency argument
- Anselm