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Start with observations about how universe works and from this try to explain why it exists. also known as the first cause argument for the existence of God. Fundamentally, the argument is based on the claim that God must exist due to the fact that the existence of the universe requires an explanation, which must be God.

Aquinas’s First Way: the unmoved mover

In Aquinas’s First Way, he concentrated on the existence of change, or motion, in the world.

Everything is both in a state of actuality (how it is) and potentiality (what it might become).

All things that are moved (the potentiality becomes the new actuality) are moved by something else, things can’t move themselves.

The mover is moved by something else, which is moved by something else and then something else.

This cannot go on for infinity because there would be no first mover so nothing would have started moving at all.

So, there must be a first mover.

This first unmoved mover is God.

Aquinas’s Second Way: the uncaused causer

Aquinas’s Second Way is similar to his first, but it focuses on the concept of change.

Nothing can be its own efficient cause because it cannot have existed before itself.

Things that are causes must themselves be caused, otherwise the effect would be taken away.

We cannot go back to infinity (infinite regress is impossible) because there would be no first cause so all later effects couldn’t have happened.

Therefore, there must be a first efficient cause that is not instead caused.

The first uncaused causer is what everyone understands to be God.

Aquinas’s Third Way: contingency and necessity

Everything in nature is contingent, it relies on something to have brought it into existence.

If we trace back, nothing existed, but then nothing could have begun to exist because nothing can come from nothing (everything has to come from something)

Therefore, there needs to be a being that isn’t contingent: a necessary being.

Necessary beings could have their necessity come from another being.

But this cannot go back to infinity.

So, there must be a being that has its own necessity which causes other beings.

This is what people call God.

Gottfried Leibniz

Leibniz raised the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’, questioning why anything exists at all. He offered a form of the cosmological argument, based on his Principle of Sufficient Reason which states that everything which exists must have a reason or a cause for its existence. According to the Principle of Sufficient Reason:

If something exists, there must be a reason why that thing exists.

If a statement is true, there must be a reason why that statement is true.

If something happens, there must be a reason why that thing happens.

Whether or not we know the reason why something exists, or is true, or happens, there still must be a reason, known or unknown. It doesn’t matter if it’s eternal or not – we still need a reason for it.

Hume’s Criticisms of the Cosmological Argument

Can we make the jump from Aquinas’s observations to the Christian God? The effect cannot immediately point towards a particular cause because causation is a psychological concept, we cannot make links that are beyond our experience – we could imagine anything to create the universe: a stupid God, a committee of Gods, a demon etc. God is just one of a large number of possible hypotheses.

Is it plausible for anything but a transcendent God to create the universe? Aristotle, Aquinas: need a necessary being that would have to transcend the rest of the universe to exist in a unique, all-powerful way.

When we look at the world, we have only the effect to look at – the cause is hidden from us. He uses the example of a pair of scales with one end hidden from view: we can see that the other end outweighs it, but  we have no means of knowing by how much.

It isn’t necessary to suppose that everything has a cause

Just because everything in the universe has a cause or reason to exist, doesn’t mean the entire universe has a cause or reason to exist (just because you can explain the cause of 20 particles of matter doesn’t mean you can explain the cause of the group of the particles)

Bertrand Russell: just because every human being has a mother, doesn’t mean that the human species as a whole has a mother.

BUT modern science suggests there is a definite beginning to the universe

I have just completed my A Level exams, and decided to make this page to post my OCR Religious Studies notes and A* essays.

Most of my notes were made from the textbook, so they will be very similar, although I tried to put in some extra reading where I could.

Essays were marked by teachers who also mark for the OCR exam board.

Notes:

Philosophy

Christianity

Ethics

The Idea of Divine Power

Divine Omniscience and God's Relationship with Time

The Omniscience and Justice of God in Relation to Human Free Will

The Omnibenevolence and Justice of God

Irenaeus argued that God allows evil and suffering to have a place in the world alongside goodness so we can develop and grow as human beings into a mature and free relationship with God. He argued that there had to be evil in the world for us to be able to appreciate good, just as we may not appreciate summer days unless we were cold in the winter. Good is a qualitative judgement, a comparative, and so there have to be other, less good things for goodness to exist at all. As well as this, evil is necessary for us to develop as free individuals who make their own moral decisions and are responsible for them – if everything went our way, we could never learn anything.

When God created us in his ‘image’, He created us with free will. Irenaeus drew a distinction between God’s image and his likeness. He argued that God created humans imperfectly so they could develop from the image of God to likeness of God by using the reason and free will He has given us: ‘let us make man in our image, after our likeness’. Therefore, evil is necessary for us to make real choices between right and wrong - achieving the likeness of God requires the willing co-operation of humans, rather than us being given the right choice every time and so there has to be the possibility of choosing good instead of evil. Irenaeus writes: “if we had no knowledge of the contrary, could we have instruction in that which is good?”. If God were to intervene, we would lose our free will and reason. Evil and suffering must also necessarily occur so we can strive to meet challenges in order to gain perfection, supported by St Paul: “We rejoice in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance, character and hope.” However, this does not justify unnecessary evils, such as the example of the fawn dying in the forest fire, or babies who suffer and cannot learn from it.

Discussing Irenaeus

More optimistic as it suggests God knows what He is doing and good will come out of every situation

Some people suffer more than others, does this mean God wants some people to grow to spiritual maturity, but doesn’t care whether those who lead peaceful and contented lives learn very much?

Some people may suffer and not be able to learn from it, such as babies being ill, or a person with learning difficulties being injured in a fire.

Animal suffering is hard to justify – there is no learning or life after death for them, and often they suffer when no one is around so no one can learn from it (see William L. Rowe’s example of fawn)

Augustine argued that evil is not a real, actual quality in its own right, but rather a ‘privato boni’, a privation (lack) of good. He argued that God could not have created anything evil because in the Bible it says, “God saw all that he had made and it was good.” So, evil did not have its own separate existence of powerful force, but was an absence of good, just as darkness is an absence of light. He argued that humanity was created perfectly, but fell away from God through the misuse of free will.

In his view, evil stems from entities with free will, first coming into the world through the ‘Fall’ of the angels. Angels were created perfectly, but some received less grace (assistance from God in their attempts to be holy) than others, as a part of the variety of things (he argued that variety is part of the goodness and perfection of the created world, but as a result of this difference some creatures will be more limited than others). The angels then fell away from God as a result of their misuse of free will, deciding to rival Him rather than worship Him. This caused a loss in natural order, and so angels are responsible for natural evil.

Augustine then argued that because of this, Adam and Eve were tempted by Satan to eat the forbidden fruit, leaving God’s perfect plan and causing inherent sin for man. Because they were told that the consequence of knowing the truth of good and evil was death, they went from immortal to mortal. He goes on to say that because we were seminally present in the loins of Adam, we carry the original sin with us. This is often criticised as it is illogical to suggest a just God would blame us for someone else’s sins, supported by the Old Testament quote “should the children’s teeth be set on edge because their fathers ate sour grapes?” Evil is therefore a result of man no longer being in a close relationship with God, which destroyed the delicate balance of the world, so humans are to blame for moral evil. God not responsible for evil because if he were to intervene, it would not be right as the punishment is ‘justice’ for human sin and God is ‘just’. Augustine’s theodicy is described as a soul-deciding theodicy as we decide to obey God or not.

Further discussing Augustine:

A strength of Augustine’s argument is that he never suggests that God in any way tolerates evil, or suggests that evil is not really that bad – he never allows the idea that God wants to have anything to do with evil.

However, evil is much more than ‘privato boni’ – deliberate cruelty towards a child or animal seems a lot more powerful and harmful than a lack of goodness.

Christian Scientists explain evil as some kind of illusion: sin, sickness and death would disappear if they were understood to be nothingness and in total contrast to the ‘allness’ of God.

However, even if they are ultimately illusions, these illusions are real enough and has real symptoms which cannot be satisfactorily ignored.

Augustine does not explain why there is a lack of perfection in the world. Friedrich Schleiermacher argues that there is no reason for the angels to sin unless they were created imperfectly in the first place. Evil cant come out of the world from nowhere unless God made it, and if it did, this limits God’s omniscience and ominipotence.

It also poses a logical contradiction: if the world was perfect, no one would have knowledge of good and evil so how is there freedom to obey/disobey God?

The evidential problem of evil is an a posteriori approach that begins with our own experience of evil and suffering and then look for the best possible explanation for our observations. It focuses on both the presence of natural and moral evil in the world and questions why God would create the universe knowing such examples of evil and suffering would occur.

John Stuart Mill argues that the natural world is full of evidence of evil, giving powerful examples of the way in which people and other animals suffer. He argues against those who use a posteriori arguments in support of the existence of a good God, claiming that the evidence rather points to a sadistic God. He writes that the things we punish humans for, nature does every day, such as killing and torture. In saying this, he argues against supporters of the teleological arguments such as William Paley.

He thus uses this argument to support the view that if there is a God, He does not seem to be benevolent – we cannot look to Him or to nature as a guide for our own moral behaviour, and we cannot worship him for His goodness.

William L. Rowe also gave some examples of evil. "In some distant forest lightning strikes a dead tree, resulting in a forest fire. In the fire a fawn is trapped, horribly burned, and lies in terrible agony for several days before death relieves its suffering." Arguably, God could have prevented this suffering, but doesn’t. Rowe also cites the example of human evil where an innocent child is a victim of violence and thereby suffers.

The logical problemof evil is an a priori, deductive argument in that in begins with an idea of God, and then looks to defend this idea in the face of the observations of evil and suffering. It criticises the Judaeo-Christian God, questioning how an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent being can coexist with evil and suffering in the world.

It is a view supported by David Hume, but J. L. Mackie is the best known modern proponent of the logic form of this argument, writing “The problem of evil […] is a problem only for someone who believes that there is a God who is both omnipotent and wholly good,” and clarifies it is a logical problem, not a “scientific problem that might be solved by further observations, or a practical problem that might be solved by a decision or an action.”

It sometimes makes reference to the inconsistent triad, an idea from Epicurus, which consists of three premises:

That God is perfectly good.

That God is all-powerful.

That evil and suffering exist.

However, these three things cannot coexist.

If God was perfectly good, he would seek to eliminate evil, as his all-loving nature would not want humans to suffer. If there is a God who is all powerful, we can presume he has the abilities to make any kind of world, or no world at all. He could create a world without evil and suffering, and yet he chose not to, which is inconsistent with the claims he omnibenevolent and omnipotent. If he is truly all-powerful, he would be able to eliminate the evil in the world. Therefore, God’s attributes are mutually exclusive, and He cannot exist, just as a square circle cannot exist. God is logically inconsistent with the existence of evil.

To argue against this, the premises can be broken down. Attacking one premise destroys the entire argument.

Premise 1, that an omnibenevolent God would seek to eliminate evil assumes it is better to have no evil than have evil. Irenaeus, Hick, and Swinburne all argue against this. There could be reasons why God doesn’t seek to eliminate evil, as it is necessary for us to mature and develop a relationship with God. Therefore, it may be more loving to provide us with a ‘vale of soul-making’ rather than a world in which we have little freedom.

Premise 2, that an omnipotent God would have the power to eliminate evil works on the assumption that an omnipotent God can do anything at all – how can He restrict our freedom whilst simultaneously allowing us free will? Richard Swinburne argues that God can do anything that is possible, but allowing human freedom while at the same time not allowing evil is impossible, and a logical contradiction: “The less he allows men to bring about large-scale horrors, the less freedom and responsibility he gives them”. (Could also mention the omnipotence paradox).

The Influence of Religious Experience

Mystical Experience

Conversion Experience

Corporate Religious Experience

How Might Religious Experience be Understood?