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