God and Philosophy

God and Philosophy

There are many traditional views on religion and the existence of God. Some people believe there is a God and some do not, some think there is one God and some think there are many. There are also others who do not believe in God but a higher power that created us and the universe and everything in it. They cannot explain why or how but for some it's just a feeling or belief that keeps them going. It's important to view this subject from every angle, from the people who think there is a God to the people to who do not and all the way to people who just can't give a rational explanation for what happened.

Many people who do believe in God like to give the argument of Intelligent Design. They believe that all the things in the known world and universe are so great that they could never have come about simply by chance, and that they must have been the work of an intelligent designer. This is what brought about Paley's watchmaker analogy. He thought that the design of the universe and all things in it was similar to the design of a watch. Both are so intricate in their making that neither one could have come about simply by chance. So if you were walking along and saw a watch on the ground you would know that someone had made that watch. The idea that the universe and many things in it are so complex and intricate in their making can only mean that they had an intelligent designer, with all the things that make up the universe they could not have simply come together by chance. Paley puts forth the idea that since the universe is like a watch in the way that it is framed and has parts that are put together for a purpose ( even thought we may not know what that purpose is) it must have been made by an intelligent designer.

Paley's argument on design and the watchmaker are good arguments that would certainly tell us a lot about the world, however they are not themselves totally sound. We have no background knowledge to compare the watchmaker thesis to. Hume gives some good objections to this argument stating that we as people have only had the privilege of seeing one world or universe. We ourselves have never seen God, much less see him making other universes. Therefore we would not be able to conclude that an intelligent designer or God created this universe because we would have nothing else to compare it to.

However vague these inferences about the universe and intelligent design may be, at this time we do not have sufficient evidence to prove otherwise that there was no intelligent designer. Perhaps he/she is one to have never been seen or heard but is still there creating.

On the other side of things there is the argument against God. Many people do not believe in an intelligent designer and that the world just came about by chance or through millions of years of evolution. This argument can be backed up by the argument of the existence of evil, and that if God is an all knowing, all powerful, all good being then why would there be evil in the universe?

The argument of the existence of evil has sufficiently stumped religious followers in my opinion. People who argue for the existence of God say that he is an all powerful, all knowing and perfectly good being, yet there is evil in the entire world. If god is all powerful and all good then there could not be any evil, yet somehow evil exists so therefore there must be no God. Now this argument seems to stop everything right there by simply stating that if what you believe God is as a being then he can't be true because if God was all good then he would not have made evil or know what evil is. Many people who do believe in God as a designer will argue that God put evil in the world so that we may see what good is. They argue that the existence of evil in the world is all part of God's master plan for us.

Another questionable attribute that God decided to give us was pain, and many ask why did God make us able to feel pain. Some say that God made us feel pain as a warning system to something harmful, if we feel slight pain now it is better than a great pain later. Another response is that pain and suffering is here so that we as a people may better appreciate the good