Filed under: God Delusion | Tags: atheism, beauty, Dawkins, God, God Delusion, philosophy, Proof of God
You will notice that I am breaking this blog up into separate blogs for each argument. I’m doing this to make commenting and discussing it easier to follow. I hope this works for you.
The argument form beauty is another one that is not a strong rational argument even as Dawkins comments, but it is of a different nature. I come back yet again to Dawkins confession of being awed at the wonder of the universe. It is this sort of awe that lifts one to a higher level. In the presence of something so lofty you lift your eyes about the mundane and consider grander themes. Is it reason or emotion or even a spiritual impact; it is hard to say. But we are definitely touched.
So it is not a rational proof of God’s existence, but never the less something that draws us towards considering His reality.
I think one could also make the case that the sheer elegance of the universe speaks of a master watchmaker. There is far more in what we see than is necessary for an existence without God. In some senses we are coming back to the argument from design, not just in its effectiveness, but in its elegance. And in this we are therefor thinking not only of whether He exists, but what sort of God He is.
Filed under: God Delusion | Tags: Dawkins, God, God Delusion, philosophy, Proof of God, religion
Well I am again agreeing with Dawkins. He and I both find it very difficult to accept that there could be a proof of anything about the universe that is not based on experience of it. The ontological argument is supposed to prove God’s existence from pure reason and not by looking at the world at all. So we both approach this very sceptically.
When I look at the argument itself I have to agree again that it is very weak, if not totally incomprehensible. I’ll need to give it some more thought and see if it makes sense later, but at the moment I tend to agree with Dawkins that it proves nothing.
Having thought about the whole concept of a priori argument it seems to me that there is some small hope of finding a proof in it. Though it does not take experience into account it is however built in a consistent rational world. This itself might lead to a proof. However no such proof has been demonstrated here, so I will just leave this discussion agreeing with Dawkins on this one.
Filed under: God Delusion | Tags: God Delusion, philosophy, Proofs of God, religion
Well I will give it to Dawkins, he does write a page turner. I’m finding it difficult to keep my blogging up to my reading, but here is the next installment.
The section in chapter three on this is promised to be just a start on a more thorough treatment later on so this comment will be similarly brief since he does not give us his full argument here.
The only contrary argument that Dawkins gives us is that design can apparently appear by evolution. Lets not take that one head on at this stage, but simply add that it is much more than the biological world that appears designed. Dawkins himself speaks of his sense of awe looking at images of space. They are truly awesome, and not only in their beauty. We find a system that is so beautifully set up to support human life on earth to mention just one point. The earth has a magnetic field that deflects dangerous cosmic rays away from the earth. Not only that but the few that get in are directed away from most of human habitation in the frozen wastes of the polar icecaps. And not only so but they then put on a majestic display of the aurora.
There are many other such beauties in the cosmic design, but I will perhaps leave this at that point and come back to this since this is such a brief section.
Filed under: God Delusion | Tags: Dawkins, God, God Delusion, philosophy, Proof of God, Thomas Aquinas
Having read this chapter I wondered what Aquinas has actually written and I found this page. I found it quite hard reading to start with until you get into the archaic style.
To take up where I left in the last blog, we get to the forth argument about God’s existence, i.e. that He is the ultimate goodness of which our ideas are shallow reflections. I must admit that I found Dawkins “disproof” quite convincing here, which is what took me back to the original Aquinas text. And on going back to it I found the original argument quite weak. But giving it more thought I do think the proof has some merit, even if Aquinas did not fully explain it.
Dawkins tries to disprove the idea that God is the ultimate good, by throwing in some totally silly comparison of smelliness. No-one would claim that God is the ultimate of that, so why the ultimate good he argues. But Dawkins is giving us a quite different concept in smelliness. People around the world to not have an idea of ultimate smelliness beyond there everyday experience of it. They do not have an idea of ultimate smelliness that they hold in some high esteem and are in large number aiming at or trying to show they are aiming at even if they are not really. Nor even do they have the idea of ultimate smelliness that they are trying to avoid. Nor do they feel a sense incompletion in try to attain, or avoid it.
And yet this is the case with “goodness, truth and nobility and the like”. Why is it that there is a ubiquitous idea around the globe that goes well beyond our natural experience? And it is not merely an idea of goodness better than our own, but an idea of ultimate goodness beyond which there is no higher. We can imagine an idea of smelliness greater than our own, even though such an idea does not have a widespead public following, but we have no concept of a smelliness that it the ultimate that one can not surpass.
There are only a few people in human history that would be deemed to have reached this ultimate state. Some would consider such people as Buddha, Job, Enoch, and Jesus as examples. And yet without these poeple in our everyday circles of friends we have this ubiquitous idea. To me at least this does speak of some close reality that we have an inner drive towards; an idea of a higher being, the measure of total perfection.
