Theism or Atheism?
When humans consider the existence of God, they tend to look outward for evidence and inward for understanding. Humans must process both types of information through a filter that is based on an unwarranted confidence in human reasoning. Or, failing that, humans must fall back to rely on faith. The nature of faith may perhaps be characterized by an absence of definitive criteria other than the absolutes that are sometimes associated with faith. Consider the parameter suggested by the phrase: "Oh, ye of little faith" (Matthew 8:26). A believer can be described as having faith along a continuum: Great faith, little faith, no faith. However, if-then clauses are not attached to faith. It is generally not regarded as acceptable to claim that one will have faith, if something else -- whatever that concept of else may be. To qualify faith in this way transforms belief into bargaining: A person may promise to believe -- to have sufficient faith, going forward, to believe in God -- if only prayers are answered. To the contrary, belief that is grounded in human understanding is fraught with if-then qualifications. Accordingly, theism -- the belief in the existence of God -- can be defended from both a position of faith and a position of understanding.
St. Anselm argued that, "it is one thing for an object to be in the understanding, and another to understand that the object exists" (St. Anselm, n.d.). Rather than conflate conceptualization by using "the word signifying it is conceived" with the phenomenon "when the thing itself is understood," St. Anselm determined that a lexicon may provide a definition, but it does not necessarily evoke understanding. True understanding, according to St. Anselm's argument, is dependent upon the reality of the thing -- the true existence of what is conceptualized. St. Anselm uses the word conceived, which be taken to be a birthing -- a coming into being -- than a perception of what might be. St. Anselm's assertions are derived from his faith, while Gaunilo argues from a position of evidence, insisting that, "the hypothetical excellence of this island exists as a real and indubitable fact, and in no wise as any unreal object, or one whose existence is uncertain, in my understanding" (Gaunilo, n.d.).
The overarching difficulty between the two believers -- St. Anselm and Gaunilo -- is that they argue from different philosophical positions, which is not unlike the sort of argument own would hear between scientists from an empirical, positivism approach and from a naturalistic, phenomenological approach. While both may explore and analyze the same problem, the fundamental tenets of their investigations differ widely, such that different sets of data are produced and separate conclusions may be drawn. The one scientist is driven to prove and the other to surmise.
William Paley (1802) argues that people try to make too much out of the evidence that is right in front of them, dissecting it according to what they know and understand. In his analogy of the watch and the watchmaker, Paley (1802) illustrates a way of orienting to physical matter that fosters pro forma acceptance, which may be all that humans can accomplish when it comes to examining evidence that God exists. Paley asserted that, "The consciousness of knowing little need not beget a distrust of that which he does know…" (1802, p.86). Having reasoned that people can only know a little about the watchmaker, Paley expressed the belief that it is acceptable to not appreciate why there were irregularities in the watch, why "the watch sometimes went wrong, or that it seldom went exactly right" (Paley, 1802, p. 85). Yet, Aikin and Talisse (2011) would impute malice to the watchmaker, or claim the watchmaker exposed indifference to the malfunctioning of an item he specifically designed and constructed. Accepting malice or indifference as attributes native to God establishes a conundrum; that is, unless the Aikin and Talisse (2011) proposition is accepted as the only feasible reason for a malfunctioning world: that a broken world is but an artifact of the existence of evil, and that it is unrelated to the existence or non-existence of God.
Aikin and Talisse (2011) assert that humans should seek to reconcile the nature of God and man, and to nature in creation. And...
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