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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Anselm

Are there non-omnipotent gods?

30 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Faith, God, Islam, Metaphysics, Natural Science, Prayer, Supernatural

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Anselm, Elisa Freschi, ibn Sīnā, Mañjuśrī, Superman, Ted (commenter), theodicy

Several commenters had concerns about my post on not believing in God. This is understandable, since there I take a concept that a large chunk of the world’s population has oriented their lives around for over a thousand years, dismiss it in a couple short paragraphs and spend more than half the post instead discussing why I avoid calling myself an atheist.

That is to say that the topic of disbelief in God deserves more attention than I gave it there. And as most commenters pointed out, it does depend heavily on how you define God. Continue reading →

Disbelieving in God without being an atheist

08 Sunday Jul 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, God, M.T.S.R., Metaphysics, Practice

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Anselm, Benjamin C. Kinney, Christopher Hitchens, ibn Rushd, identity, religion, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Speculative Realism, theodicy

In recent years – years since I began writing this blog – I have come to realize that I do not believe in God. This is not a mere agnosticism; I believe that God does not exist. The idea of God once helped us make sense of the physical world in a way that it no longer does; the learned men and women who have studied living organisms have been most successful with a paradigm that has no need for a divine plan. Moreover the suffering of the world gives us active reason to disbelieve in God. It makes the idea of an omnipotent omnibenevolent creator seem almost absurd. There is no particular reason to believe an omnipotent being exists; if he did, he could not be omnibenevolent. He would likely be indifferent at best, evil at worst. Certainly not a being to worship or trust. I have become increasingly sympathetic to the drastic atheism of the Speculative Realist philosophers, who take their metaphors for existence from H.P. Lovecraft.

I have tended to think the non-design-based arguments for God’s existence are not taken seriously enough, and have defended them here in the past. But in the end I do not think they succeed. Continue reading →

Value as proof of God

23 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Biology, Christianity, Foundations of Ethics, God, Metaphysics

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Anselm, Aristotle, C.S. Lewis, Charles Darwin

The posts of the previous couple weeks begin to add up to an argument for the existence of something like God – a value or goodness that is an inextricable part of the basic structure of reality. It strikes me that a significant part of this line of reasoning also underlies most of the widely known philosophical proofs for the existence of God. These proofs (at least on their own) do not take us to any of the particular Abrahamic views of God, as revealed in Qur’an or Torah or the person of Jesus Christ, but they are often taken as a first step to getting there.
Continue reading →

The God hypothesis

07 Sunday Feb 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Biology, Christianity, Consciousness, Free Will, God, Islam, Vedānta

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Anselm, Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, ibn Rushd, intelligent design, nonhuman animals, Paul and Patricia Churchland, Rāmānuja, Śaṅkara

In my intro religious studies course last semester, I taught a unit on theism and evolution. This was the first time it really hit me that God had once been considered a verifiable – and confirmed – scientific hypothesis. Until he made his famous voyage, Charles Darwin, just like so many medieval philosophers, had looked at organisms’ suitability for their environments and concluded it must have been the work of an intelligent designer. The particular theory that had best fit the available empirical evidence, Darwin and most of his contemporaries thought, was Charles Lyell‘s view that there were “centres of creation,” different places on earth where divine creative activity had been focused. In an era of rapid-discovery science like our own, that had been the best available hypothesis.

Then, the HMS Beagle made its famous voyage to the Galàpagos Islands, where Darwin observed his famous finches. A huge variety of birds, each on different islands and looking dramatically different, each well suited to the conditions of its own island – but they all turned out biologically to be finches, closely related to each other and to the finches of distant South America. It seemed needlessly complex to suggest that God would create so many different birds in so many different places and yet make them all part of the same family. A more straightforward hypothesis was that the different finches had evolved from a common ancestor, by natural selection. God was no longer needed as a scientific hypothesis – and hasn’t been needed since.

In retrospect, the point that God was once a legitimate hypothesis seems obvious to me now. But when I encountered it, it came to me as something of a surprise, because I’m so used to living in a world where any attempt to find empirical evidence for God’s existence looks like a desperate grasping at straws. Continue reading →

The four explanations and the First Explanation

25 Wednesday Nov 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Epistemology, God, Greek and Roman Tradition, Islam, Metaphysics, Roman Catholicism

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, Anselm, Aristotle, ibn Rushd

I’m really enjoying Alasdair MacIntyre’s new book God, Philosophy, Universities. I appreciate MacIntyre’s ability to get succinctly to the heart of bewildering and perplexing philosophical concepts. Especially, reading MacIntyre on the great Muslim philosopher ibn Rushd (Averroës), I finally feel like I have a handle on Aristotle’s theory of “causes.” We are often told that Aristotle believes in four kinds of causes – formal, material, effective and final – and that these causes lead back in a chain to a First Cause, which later theistic philosophers like ibn Rushd would come to identify with the Islamic or Christian God. This all left me bewildered. How can a thing’s final cause (which is to say its purpose) be considered a cause of it? Can God really be reduced merely to the first link in a causal chain of events? Such a god barely seems to matter. Continue reading →

The God that matters

21 Sunday Jun 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in God, Islam, Judaism, Metaphysics, Roman Catholicism

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Anselm, Iris Murdoch

You believe that there is no God? Well, what is God? Suppose that God is the greatest being that can be conceived. Now even if you don’t think that such a being exists, you can still understand the idea of such a being; you can still conceive of it. Therefore, whether or not such a being exists in reality, it must at least exist in your mind. But a being that existed in reality would be greater than a being that existed only in your mind. Therefore, for such a being to exist only in your mind, and not in reality, would be a contradiction in terms; for if it existed only in your mind, it would both be the greatest being that can be conceived (that’s what you’re conceiving of) and not be the greatest thing that can be conceived (because the same being existing in reality would be greater). So the greatest being that can be conceived – this being must exist in reality as well as in thought.

This is a simplified version of Anselm’s argument for the existence of God, often called the “ontological” argument. I’m not sure whether it really works; I’m inclined to say it doesn’t, although it’s hard to say where the logic goes wrong, especially in the more sophisticated version presented by Anselm himself.

Nevertheless, I consider it the best and most important of the proofs of God’s existence, even if it doesn’t work. Why? Continue reading →

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