Unit 2 - Aesthetics, Logic, and God’s Existence

Aesthetics

• What kinds of question are we asking when we questions of aesthetics?

  • What is beauty?

  • How do we know what is beauty?

  • How/can we create the beautiful?

  • Is the beautiful true?

  • Is the beautiful good?

  • Is the beautiful real?

Beauty

• “Commonly defined as a characteristic present in objects, such as nature, work, and a human person, that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, joy, and satisfaction to the observer

The birth of Aesthetics

• Alexander Baumgarten (1714-1762) coined the term aesthetics

• For Baumgarten the purpose of art is to produce beauty

• Beauty is:

  • Best found in nature

  • Art is an imitation of nature

Rewind to the Ancients

• Aesthetics was not its own realm

• Greek philosophy was oriented towards eudaimonia

  • Beauty was ordered to the good

  • The ultimate good pointed toward the divine

• Beauty has an objective components

• Connected to mathematics and therefore order, unity, and balance

• Plato

  • Thinks things like beauty, good, justice have ideal, eternal forms

  • These are divine

  • Beauty exists in the realm of the gods, imperfectly replicated in the material realm

  • Sharp divide between the material and immaterial realm

  • Truth, beauty, and goodness go together

  • Not a fan of the artists and poets

• Augustine (354-430) and Aquinas (1225-1274)

  • Maintained the unity of truth, beauty, and goodness

  • God is the final end

    • Augustine’s view of virtues

    • Aquinas’s beatitude (friendship with God)

The birth of Aesthetics

• Alexander Baumgarten (1714-1762) coined the term aesthetics

• The focus will shift to art away from beauty

Modern Developments

• Hume

  • Did not like the idea that beauty was the result of unexamined custom

  • He though there would be correct and incorrect judgements about what is beautiful

• Kant

  • Beauty evoke love without desire

  • Beauty is entirely disinterested

    • Beauty is non-intrumental (good regardless of its usefulness)

  • Nature is beautiful because it looks like art, but all art is artificial because it is just a representation

• Schopenhauer

  • Art is not beautiful because it imitates nature

  • Art attempts to give us a picture of a universal rather than a particular

Subjective an Objective Elements of Beauty

• Ancients and Medieval Christians largely saw beauty as objective

  • It derived front the divine realm

    • Beauty is that which is enchanted?

• Moderns emphasize the role of the subject beholding the object in the role of beauty

Moral Beauty

• Ancients and Christians see beauty and morality as interwinded

• Leo Tolstoy (Russian author 1828-1910) though art can only be good if it has a moral purpose

  • It should inject moral emotions

• Neitzsche (1844-1900) though art and morality were distinct and art was supreme

• 20th century ethos is that art can be great while morally deleterious

Arguments

• Logic is a discipline used to differentiate good arguments from bad

  • Inductive and deductive are different forms of logic

• Statements are claims that can either be true or false

• An argument is a sequence of statements

• The lasting claim in a sequence in the conclusion are called conclusions

• Statements in support of the conclusion are called premises

• Every argument has a premise, so it is not a flaw to ed an argument to not have argued for the premises

Valid and Invalid Arguments

• Valid arguments - if the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true

  • True premises, true conclusion

  • Example

    • Premise: all biologists are scientists

    • Premise: John is not a scientists

    • Conclusion: John is not a biologist

• Valid arguments can have

  • False premises, false conclusion

  • Example:

    • Premise: all humans are plants

    • Premise: John is a human

    • Conclusion: John is a plant

• Valid arguments can have

  • False premises, true conclusion

  • Example

    • Premise: all dogs are humans

    • Premise: John is a dog

    • Conclusion: John is a human

• But deductive valid arguments cannot have

  • True premises and a false conclusion

• The question at hand with valid/invalid arguments is whether the form of the argument is good, not its content

• When we speak of formal validity, it is our focus

• Since arguments forms are structure distinct from argument content, we can easily signify different forms by using letters to represent statements in the argument

  • If p, the q

  • p

  • Therefore p

Common Forms: Hypothetical/Conditional

• Some of the more common arguments patterns that you encounter are deductive, and they contain one or more conditional, of if-then, premises

• The first statement in a conditional premise (the if part) is know as the antecedent

• The second part (then part) is know as the consequent

• A syllogism is a deductive argument made up of three statements- two premises and a conclusion

Common Forms: Modus Ponens

• Modus ponens

  • If P then Q

  • P

  • Therefore, Q

• Example

  • If the job is worth doing, then it’s worth doing well

  • The job is worth doing

  • Therefore, it’s worth doing well

Common Forms: Modus Tollens

• Modus tollens

  • If P then Q

  • Not P

  • Therefore, Q

• Example

  • If it’s raining, the park is closed

  • The park is not closes

  • Therefore, it’s not raining

Common Forms: Disjunctive Syllogism

• Disjunctive syllogism

  • Either P or Q

  • Not P

  • Therefore, Q

• Example

  • Either Ralph walked the dog, or he stayed home

  • He didn’t walk the dog

  • Therefore, he stayed home

Common Forms: Hypothetical Syllogism

• Hypothetical syllogism

  • If P then Q

  • If Q then R

  • Therefore, if P then R

• Example

  • If the ball drops, the lever turns to the right

  • If the lever turns to the right, the engine will stop

  • Therefore, if the ball drops, the engine will stop

Common Invalid Forms: Denying the Antecedent

• Denying the antecedent

  • If P then Q

  • Not P

  • Therefore, not Q (this is not a valid argument)

• Example

  • If Einstein invented the steam engine, then he’s a great scientists

  • Einstein did not invent the steam engine

  • Therefore, Einstein is not a great scientist

Commons Invalid Forms: Affirming the Consequent

• Affirming the consequent

  • If P then Q

  • Q

  • Therefore, P (this is not a valid argument)

• Example

  • If Springfield is the capital of Missouri, then it is in Missouri

  • Springfield is in Missouri

  • Therefore, Springfield is the capital of Missouri

The Limits of Logic

• If two things are indistinguishable by ordinary means, the if one is red, so it the other

  • The one is red

  • Therefore, so is the other

  • The result means that you might have a bright yellow tile that through a modus ponens (the valid argument) leads to an absurd conclusion

• Arguments that are valid can be bad arguments

  • They might be circular

    • God exists

    • Therefore, God exists

• Premises must be believable independent of the conclusion

  • God knows when you will die

  • Therefore, God exists

• Provided a premise that requires believing the conclusion is begging the questions

  • In other words, an argument that demand that you first ask another, different question is not question begging

• You can have arguments that are non-demostrative (not valid) but are still good arguments

  • For instance, strong inductive arguments are good arguments even though they are not deductively valid

    • The sun rises every morning, therefore the sum will rise tomorrow

  • Inferences to the best explanation are an example of good non-demonstrative arguments

    • When you begin with a group of settled facts and reason backwards to a theory that best explains them

Philosophy of Religion

• What do we mean by God?

• How philosophy and faith can relate

  • Conflict

  • Compartmental

  • Convergence

Topics

• Arguments about God

  • The ontological argument

  • The cosmological argument

  • The argument for design

  • The moral argument

• Rebuttals

  • The problem of evil

• Having proof and basic beliefs

The Ontological Argument

• Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109)

  1. God is the greatest conceivable being

  2. God has all possible perfections

  3. Existence is a perfection

  4. God has the property of existence

  5. Therefore, God exists

• Premises one and two are simply statin the definition of the GCB

  • This is an a priori argument

• Premise three and four

  • Aquinas think this is like saying God’s existence is self evident

  • Gaunilo’s objection - you can’t move from an idea of something to it’s reality

  • Kant does not think that existence is a real predicate

• Does this argument prove God’s existence?

• What did Anselm thinks this argument did?

• Anselm was a theologian, the first of the scholastic theologians

  • Theology is “faith seeking understanding” or rather he says, “I believe in order that I may understand”

    • We don’t believe only to experience but also to understand

• Anselm’s goal was not to discover reasons to believe but the reasons for what we already believe

• Reason is not sought as a pre-requisite or in order to make faith more certain but to make faith more understandable

• Human reason is not bad

  • 1 Peter 3 - always be prepared…

  • Human reason is given by God, so it is dependent on God

• Attempting to prove God is a practice in the mind taking the shape of the heart’s love for God

  • The questions here are not epistemic in the way that we assume as moderns

The Cosmological Argument

• One of the more famous versions of this comes from Thomas Aquinas

  • Aquinas though that knowledge of God should be made available in the most obvious way, namely his effects

    • This is an empirical argument

    • It asks, what is the best explanation for the existence of anything in the world? Why is there something rather than nothing?

      • The answer, like Anselm’s, is theological

• Aquinas’s Five Ways (or five things in the world that prove “what everyone understand to be God”)

  • The reality of motion, efficient causes, contingent beings, morality, and design

• Multiple version of the cosmological argument

• For instance, Kalam’s (repeated by early Christian theologians and used by Jewish and Muslim thinker as well)

• This is a valid deductive argument

  1. Whatever beings to exist has a cause

  2. The universe began to exist

  3. Therefore, the universe has a cause

• Recent scientific consensus around the fact that the earth has a “start date” has made premise two even more trustworthy

• If true, this argument out naturalism/materialism and nontheistic religions

• It established a “transcendent, personal, immaterial, necessary, and singular cause of the universe”

• This is not specifically the Christian God, but it is consistent with him

• Objections

  • Aquinas state, “this cannot go on the infinity, because then there would be no first mover, and consequently, no other mover, seeing that subsequent movers only inasmuch as they are moved by the first mover”

  • In other worlds, Aquinas rules out the possibility of an infinite regress

  • This has been challenged as an unwarranted assumption

  • Samuel Clarke (1675-1729) leaves open the possibility for an infinite regress and reworks the argument accordingly

  • Dependent being - anything whose reason for existence is outside itself

  • Independent being - anything that has a reason for existence inside itself

  • Clarke’s argument takes the form of a reductio ad absurdum

    1. A

    2. If A, then B

    3. If A, then not B

    4. Therefore, not A

  1. Suppose there is nothing but an infinite causal regress of dependent beings, or an ICRDB for short

  2. There must be some explanation of the existence of the entire ICRDB

  3. That explanation can’t exist outside of the ICRDB

  4. Nor can that explanation exist inside of the ICRDB

  5. So, the ICRSB exists without any explanation at all

  6. This contradicts the second premise

  7. Therefore, the supposition in premise 1 must be false

• David Hume objects to premise two

  • He argues you can have reasons for all the individual items in a system without needing an explanation for the whole

• Hume’s principle - “once you have explained the properties of each element in a totality, you have explained that features of the totality as well”

The Argument from Morality

• The argument from morality can be displayed as such

  1. If God does not exist, there are no objective moral properties

  2. Objective moral properties exist

  3. Therefore, God exists

• The old atheists think that this argument is correct, but they do not agree with the conclusion

• They attack premise two

• The old atheists

  • Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

    • Nietzsche calls ethics a “soporific device”… in other words, having nice moral boxes that you can tough helps you sleep will at night

    • If we step outside of this delusion and move “beyond good and evil” we recognize that our behavior is only shaped by our will to power

    • God doesn’t exist, therefore there is no ethics

  • Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

    • He thinks that morality rises and falls with God and that “all we can do…is build out lives on “the firm foundation of unyielding despair”

    • So, Russell argues that there are no objective moral properties but that moral properties are subjective

• The new atheists don’t want to deny moral standards so they try to find other ways of identifying moral standards in the world

• One might suggest that when the old atheists “killed God” they understood the gravity of their endeavor

• The new atheists (who rarely are commended for their depth or sharpness of thoughts) are more rhetorically oriented

• Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett

• A puzzle about God and morality from Plato’s Euthyphro

• In the story Plato writes of Socrates bumping to a man named Euthyphro who claims that morality is that which pleases the gods (a polytheistic context)

• One images then the gods or God going through various actions and labeling them moral or immoral

• Is the good good because God says it is or does God say it is because it is good

• Are the decisions that God makes about morality of an item arbitrary or not?

  • If they are arbitrary then our morals are based on nothing more than an arbitrary decree?

  • If they are not arbitrary then the morality is based upon something that is independent of God (i.e., they are moral or immoral and even God must admit that)

  • This is one way of asking the question, is God murders someone is it still a sin?

The Problem of Evil

• This sometimes would be better described as the problem of suffering

• In short, if there is a good all-powerful, and all-knowing God who is in charge, why does there seem to be so much suffering in the world?

• There are two objections raised here: one logical and one evidential

• Responses to the problem of evil are know as theodicies

• While not the first, our friend, David Hume, submitted the following argument

• The following points are logically inconsistent

  1. God is omnipotent (all-powerful)

  2. God is omniscient (all-knowing)

  3. God is perfectly good

  4. There is evil in the world

• The logical problem can be solved saying

  • One can not that some good things (compassion and empathy) in the world require suffering and are justified

  • Therefore, a fifth point must be considered

    5. There is no morally sufficient reason for God to allow evil

• The argument can be formalized as such

  1. A perfect (all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good) God exists

  2. Evil exists

  3. A perfect God would allow evil only if there were a morally sufficient reason to allow it

  4. There is no morally sufficient reason for God to allow evil

• This argument points to the evidentiary problem: namely, the existence of evil may not be a logical problem, but why is there so much suffering in the world?

  • Jesus is the truth and love. Love and truth go together and sometimes it is not always needed to be logical

• A response by Eleanore Stump (1947-)

  • Based on the Christian traditions and three theological beliefs

  1. Adam fell

  2. Natural evil entered the world as a result of Adam’s fall

  3. After death, depending on their state at the time of their death, either (a) human beings go to heaven or (b) they go to hell

• Stump defends these in turn as follows:

  1. Adam fell, which implies three things

     • Due to humans’ choices their will were altered for the worse

       • Adam and Eve sin

     • The alteration involves the nature of human free will

       • According to Anselm and Aquinas (among others) out wills work in tandem with reason and desire

       • A truly free will is that “is disposed to will the good consistently/ constantly”

     • The change of nature in the will is inheritable (passed down)

       • Humans must be free to make decision of serious consequence

  2. Natural evil entered the world as a result of Adam’s fall

     • No person suffered from disease, tornados, droughts, etc, until Adam’s fall

     • She notes she does not need to prove this (or any of their points) by only show they are not demostrably false

  3. After death, depending on their state at the time of their death, either (a) human beings go to heaven or (b) they go to hell

     • Hell raises a new level of the problem of evil

     • Stump points to the Christian tradition (such as Dante) and the essence of hell as absence of union with God

     • She conclude that “everlasting life in hell is the ultimate evil which can befall a person in this world; but the torments of hell are the natural conditions of some persons, and God can spare such persons those pains only by depriving them of their nature or their existence

• A response by Eleanore Stump in summary

  • Adam’s fall created a defect in the will

  • This inclines human to will what they ought not to

  • It is not possible for people to go to heaven (be in union with God) while in this condition

• Must God try to fix this?

  • He cannot fix this by using his omnipotence without violating free will

    • To remove the defect miraculously would force person’s free will to be other than they can be

    • Even though God is omnipotent, he cannot “directly and miraculously could remove the defect in free will”

• Stump does not say that God causes suffering, but the suffering “will be justified it if bring that person nearer to the ultimate good in a way he could not have been without the suffering”

• God can help us have the will in order to go the good

  • We freely choose to be helped by God

The Argument from Design

• Seeds of this argument an be seen in Aquinas’s fifth way which points to all things being ordered to a valuable end

• The argument runs that the apparent complexity in nature shows there must be a sentient, intelligent designer

• William Paley (1743-1805)

• You are hiking in the woods and stumble upon a watch, What is the best explanation for that watch?

• Like the watch, “the universe…shares marks of intelligence - complexity, order, and purpose - and it is reasonable to think that the universe is the product of intelligent design

  1. The natural world shows considerable complexity and apparent design

  2. The only possible explanation of this complexity and apparent design in the natural world is that the natural world was produces by an intelligent sentient designer

  3. Therefor, there must be an intelligent, sentient designer responsible for the complexity and apparent design in the natural world

• Premise one is generally accepted

  • Some complain that this like having only one opening (through) for water and air is evidence of poor design

• Premise two meets more objections

  • From our friend David Hume…

    • We cannot infer a single designer..design by committee?

    • Does the designer need to be the first cause?

  • If the argument for design works in tandem with the cosmological argument, the it provides evidence of a personal and intelligent cause, rather than proof of the first cause (for that you can refer to the cosmological argument)

• Objection based on evolution through natural selection

• What responsibilities are possible?

  • You could look to disprove evolution as a theory

  • You could hold evolution in tandem with theism

  • You can change the argument so that the intelligent designer is not the ONLY person possible explanation but the best

• Argument for fine-tuning is

  1. The existence of a fine-tuned universe is not surprising under theism

  2. The existence of a fine-tuned universe is enormously surprising under naturalism

  3. Therefore, by the likelihood principle, the existence of a fine-tuned universe strongly supports theism over naturalism

Pascal’s Wager

• Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

  • Has a transformative mystical experience that brings him to faith and his works tries to wrestle out the defense of this faith

• Is known as a historical proponent of fideism

• Fideism - the reliance upon faith rather than reason in matters of philosophy and religion

  • Truth of certain kinds can only be attainted by “foregoing rational inquiry and relying souly on faith”

• We cannot know if God exists

  • For Pascal, “reason will not be enable to decide either way [whether God does or does not exist], or rule out either alternative”

  • Because “if there is a God, he is infinitely beyond out comprehension, since having neither parts nor limits he bears no relation to us?

• The Bet

  • Deciding if God exists is like guessing heads or tails on a coin flip that is happening at the end of an infinite path/road

  • But you must bet

    • There is not neutral position. You are already implicated

    • Decision theory based upon expected utility

• Decision theory based upon expected utility

• In the face of having to make a decision and being unable to know for certain, the rational thing to do is to bet on God existing

• Objections

  1. If you don’t believe in God, but you think it is rational to bet of God’s existence, how can you force yourself to believe that God exists?

  2. Can you become a believer for purely self-interested reasons?

  3. Does this prove any particular religion or just the irrationality of atheism and agnosticism?

  4. What is the God that exists is perverse and punishes those that are religious rather than rewards them?