Hales This is Philosophy 2nd Ed. God

Agnosticism

Withholding judgment about the existence of God.

Atheism

Judging that there is no God.

Begging the question

Assuming the very thing that needs to be proven; typically when the premises of an argument presuppose its conclusion.

Cosmological argument

One of the traditional arguments for God's existence. According to this argument, God exists because there had to be a first cause, or prime mover, that started the causal chain of physical events.

Moral evils

Murder, war, rape, torture, theft, deception, assault, etc. To be contrasted with natural evils.

Natural evils

Diseases, floods, famines, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanoes, etc. To be contrasted with moral evils.

Natural theology

The philosophical tradition of using reason to evaluate claims of the divine.

Ontological argument

One of the traditional arguments for God's existence. It relies on the idea that since God is the most perfect being imaginable, and it is more perfect to exist than not exist, to imagine God at all is to concede his existence.

Pascal's wager

Blaise Pascal's argument that it is rational to believe that God exists because it is only if God exists that you have something to win or lose by believing, and if he does exist you win big by believing and lose big by not believing.

Problem of evil

The argument that there is no God because worldly suffering is incompatible with the attributes of God.

Religious pluralism argument

The argument that there is no God because it is inconsistent to believe in one god over any of the thousands of others that people have believed in, when the evidence for any of these gods is the same.

Teleological argument (a.k.a. the argument from design)

One of the traditional arguments for God's existence. According to this argument, God exists because his existence best explains the complexity and order of the universe.

Theism

Judging that there is a God.