Science vs. God no.1

So this is an ongoing for ever and ever debate and last night while the other guys were gone looking for food I sneaked in the PC room and put up a slide just for me to remind me of some key point of the debate. Christoff is an avowed atheist and JimB admittedly religious so it is left to Manolo and me to adopt a more skeptical position on the topic. Given that Manolo is after girls most of the time I should just count me. Here is the slide and some key points I overheard last week by a group of students:

I want to go over some of the arguments FOR the existence of God. These were put forwards, not surprisingly, by theologians. This is not to imply that theologians are the only people backing God, but we have to remember that monks and priests have always had the advantage of making money out of sitting all day reading books and pursuing whatever they wanted besides religion. Many individuals in the 1700's and 1800's went into priesthood so that they could study science and/or philosophy ( Gregor Mendel - 1822-84). So naturally clergy men used to be among the most educated in art, philosophy, philology and even science. That makes the fact they ignored, and still do, scientific theory even more reprehensible.

St. Thomas Aquinas's 5 arguments

- The "unmoved mover" - someone set everything in motion since whatever is in motion is set by another thing....infinite regression....God
- The "first cause" - causality...infinite regression...God
- The cosmological argument - all things have a beginning and end. But nothing comes from nothing so something must have existed when nothing else did...God
- The teleological argument - design of the world
- The absolutes argument - A good person for example is good, better, or worse compared to a standard we have. This standard is one of infinite goodness, which is God

St. Anselm's ontological argument

God is a being than which nothing greater can be conceived. If God existed only in mind, He then would not be the greatest conceivable being, for we could imagine another being that is greater because it would exist both in mind and reality ipso facto would be God. Therefore, to imagine God as existing only in the mind but not in reality leads to logical contradiction.

Immanuel Kant's moral argument

God's existence is a necessary presupposition of there bring any moral judgments that are objective, that go beyond mere relativistic moral preferences. Such judgments require standards external to any human mind-that is, they presume God's mind.

Many of these arguments have been refuted in the past and I will no go into that. For further reference one can read Bertrand Russel's "History of Western Philosophy" where he gives a very good account of the ideas of major Christian philosophers and the church fathers. Richard Dawkins in "The God Delusion" tries to refute the arguments by St. Thomas and St. Anslem. Dawkins also discusses how someone can be moral without the fear of Hell. As for the objectivity of moral judgments and the relative nature of good and bad one can turn to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche for an enjoyable account in "Beyond Good and Evil", or to Marc Hauser for a more science oriented account in his book "Moral Minds: How Nature Designed a Universal Sense of Right and Wrong".

-John