Theism

Description

In this book, I discuss the question whether God exists, not as a Tillichian religious symbol, but as an actual person, albeit a person who is very different from you and me. My procedure is to examine arguments bdth for and against God's existence qua person and to assess their relative merits. I shall try to show that there is more evidence that God exists than that he does not. This position is, of course, rejected nowadays, even by most religious thinkers, who hold, for one reason or another, that evidence has nothing to do with religious belief, properly understood. My reply to these thinkers is simply to ask them to examine what follows. A useful companion to Chapters 4, 5, 6, 7, and the Appendix of this book would be Alvin Plantinga's The Nature of Necessity.l Though I avoid technical terminology wherever possible, those chapters presuppose an elementary understanding of 'possible worlds' discourse; and a clear and concise explanation of that terminology can be found in Chapter IV of Plantinga's book. Also, I use 'logical' throughout to mean what Plantinga means by 'broadly logical' on page 2 of The Nature of Necessity. Front Matter....Pages i-xi Does Suffering Serve Valuable Ends?....Pages 1-13 The Cosmological Argument....Pages 14-24 The Design Argument....Pages 25-35 A Moral Argument....Pages 36-48 A Modal Argument....Pages 49-61 Is God’S Existence Logically Possible?....Pages 62-81 Descartes’s Meditation V Argument....Pages 82-103 Agnosticism....Pages 104-110 God and Perceptual Skepticism....Pages 111-140 Back Matter....Pages 141-200