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Proponents most commonly use the argument in a weaker way, however: not with the aim of disproving the existence of God, but rather as a reductio ad absurdum of the well-known argument from design (which suggests that living things appear too well-designed to have originated by chance, and so an intelligent God or gods must have deliberately ...
The development of process theology has challenged the Irenaean tradition by teaching that God using suffering for his own ends would be immoral. Twentieth-century philosopher Alvin Plantinga's freewill defense argues that, while this may be the best world God could have created, God's options were limited by the need to allow freewill.
The argument from beauty (also the aesthetic argument) is an argument for the existence of a realm of immaterial ideas or, most commonly, for the existence of God, that roughly states that the evident beauty in nature, art and music and even in more abstract areas like the elegance of the laws of physics or the elegant laws of mathematics is evidence of a creator deity who has arranged these ...
Epicurus was not an atheist, although he rejected the idea of a god concerned with human affairs; followers of Epicureanism denied the idea that there was no god. While the conception of a supreme, happy and blessed god was the most popular during his time, Epicurus rejected such a notion, as he considered it too heavy a burden for a god to have to worry about all the problems in the world.
[7] [8] Thomas à Kempis, on the other hand, presented a path to The Imitation of Christ based on a focus on the interior life and withdrawal from the world. [ 9 ] The theme of imitation of Christ existed in all phases of Byzantine theology , and in the 14th-century book Life in Christ Nicholas Cabasilas viewed "living one's own personal life ...
The arguments propose that only the existence of God as orthodoxly conceived could support the existence of moral order in the universe, so God must exist. Alternative arguments from moral order have proposed that we have an obligation to attain the perfect good of both happiness and moral virtue.
"Wherefore, using the language of probability, we may say that the world became a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence by the providence of God" (30a–b). Then, since the part is imperfect compared to the whole, the world had to be one and only.
He compares the popular knowledge of the world in Thomas Aquinas's time to what we now know about the world. He uses the example of Laplace—"It works well enough without that [God] hypothesis" [19] —to demonstrate that we do not need God to explain things; he claims that religion becomes obsolete as an explanation when it becomes optional ...