Philosophy Scholars

Analogy of the arrow and the archer

Thomas Aquinas

Watchmaker analogy

William Paley

Fine-tuning argument, aesthetic & anthropic principles

F R Tennant

Five counterarguments for the design argument

David Hume

The universe exists due to many smaller chances

Richard Dawkins

“It is not necessary that a machine be perfect in order to show with what design it was made”

William Paley

Motion, cause, contingency

Thomas Aquinas

Reformed the cosmological argument, rejected infinte regress

Frederick Coppleston

Principle of sufficient reason

Leibniz

More likely that there would be nothing than something

Richard Swinburne

Revised the Kalam argument

William Lane Craig

Empiricist who rejected the cosmological argument

David Hume

Cannot say that anything that exists is necessary

Immanuel Kant

Rejected the cosmological argument in three ways, including the principle of sufficient reason

Bertrand Russell

Came up with two forms of the ontological argument

Anselm

Argued existence is inseperable from God’s nature

Descartes

“The greatest being possible must have maximal existence in every world possible

Plantinga

Idea of a perfect island

Gaunilo

Simpler form of the ontological argument

Descartes

Argued it would be greater for a God that did not exist to create the world

Douglas Gasking

Thought we had to establish that something existed before we could say what it was like

Kant

All discussions about God must contain sense experience (aposteriori)

Thomas Aquinas

Inconsistent triad

J L Mackie

Describes the problem of evil as “the rock of atheism”

David Hume

Created the theodicy that says evil is not a substance but only a “privation of good”

St Augustine

Developed the Iranaean theodicy

John Hick

Created the theodicy that says perfection in humantiy cannot be created but has to develop through free choice

Irenaeus

Supported the Ireanaean theodicy, said that a world with evil is the best world

Richard Swinburne

Eschatological justification / soul-making theodicy

John Hick

Created process theodicy

A N Whitehead

PINT categories of mystical experienc, The Varieties of Mystical Experience

William James

Idea of the numinous, disagreed with naturalism

Rudolf Otto

Defended religious experience through the principles of credulity and testimony

Richard Swinburne

God helmet

Michael Persinger

Religion is a “universal obsessive neruosis”

Sigmund Freud

Argues religious experiences are just a psychotic mindset

Richard Dawkins

“if we are gullible we do not recognise hallucinations … and we claim to have heard god”

Richard Dawkins

Religious experiences could be interpreted in a non-religious way, no religion sees god as a whole so there are overlaps of REs in different religions

John Hick

Argued we can only experience things in the empirical realm

Immanuel Kant

Said all good things belong first to God so can be analogously related to him

Thomas Aquinas

First argued that religious language is neither univocal or equivocal

Thomas Aquinas

Supported symbolic language in his book ‘systematic theology and dynamics of faith’

Paul Tillich

Proposed the weak verification principle

AJ Ayer

Used John Wisdom’s parable of the gardener to explain the falsification principle

Anthony Flew

Argued religious believers have “bliks”

RM Hare

Used the parable of the partisan to show that religious believers do allow their beliefs to be challenged, just not totally falsified.

Basil Mitchell

Proposed language games

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Believed religious beliefs were expressed in “pictures”

D Z Phillips

Dualist that believed the body is temporal and the soul goes to the perfect world of forms

Plato

Believed that the soul is what animates the body, and the soul and body died at the same time as the soul is not immortal

Aristotle

Susbstance dualist, “I think, therefore I am”, you can imagine yourself without physical existence but not without concious existence

Descartes

Replica theory, if there is an afterlife there has to be a body

John Hick

Sociological critic, “opium of the masses”

Karl Marx

Religion is a sociological phenomenon that gives people a moral compass and directs them to follow societal rules

Durkheim

Psychological critic, religion is an illusion, a father substitute and a projection of the super ego

Sigmund Freud

Argues religious belied is dangerous, out of date and ridiculous

Richard Dawkins

Analogy of the kernel and the husk, deists wish to separate the reation from the irrational

M Westphal