¶ … McCloskey's refutation of the arguments of existence of God and illustration of how God (and metaphysics) can be perceived in different ways and that this precludes us from making any final judgments regarding His existence and manner of rulership.
The Cosmological argument maintains that God's existence can be deduced from the fact that every act of creation needs an initiator. The world had a beginning -- after all it is an act of creation -- someone had to create it. This someone was God.
There are various classical arguments against the cosmological arguments but McCloskey's refutation is straight and to the point: the world shows cruelty and unjustness. Positing that the world has a creator, we then inferentially transfer these attributes to the Creator and posit that He in turn is unjust and cruel. Not much hope for a believer and certainly something that doesn't make us wish to accept the existence of a God. What kind of God, in other words, is this Being.
The Teleological argument is another argument for God's existence. It points to the order and structure inherent in the world and, states that this order could not have occurred by chance. A creator must have fashioned it. The teleological argument was employed by St. Thomas Aquinas in his Five Ways, but the most famous proponent of this argument was Paley who compared the argument to a well-functioning watch that no way could have emerged by chance The complexity, order, and purpose of a watch implies intelligent design; the complexity, order, and purpose of indicates intelligent design too of another kind. Modern theological arguments employ physics as their basis for transitioning from the fact that creation is so finely-tuned to the conclusion that a Creator must have created this for a purpose (Internet Encyc. For Philosophy (IEP)).
McCloskey's refutation is the following: even if we uncritically accepted the fact that enormous design points to a creator, the design and evil as well as unhappiness that we see the world points to a malevolent and unjust creator, or, at the very least, an imperfect planner or designer.
It seems to me that Evans and Manis (2009) refute both McCloskey's points by digging holes with the various contemporary ways of viewing morals. There is the relativist perspective of seeing all morals as relative, meaning that there is no absolute right or wrong. The problem: what measure are they using to make this statement? How can they, fallible beings, assert so? The emotivist view has a similar problem. Emotivism says that moral laws are ordained by intuition.
The naturalist meanwhile claims morals to be an innate sense of nature. How does nature however make this so? What is there of nature to warrant this?
There is also the moral argument that theists give that our morals / commands are given us by a God who cares for our welfare. They may not necessarily make sense to us, but God knows better than we, deeply flawed beings do, and He cares for our welfare. We have intrinsic dignity and purpose in that we are created in the image of God. God wishes to enhance that.
Evans and Manis point out the flaws inherent in this argument too.
All of these arguments -- the moral arguments and those of McCloskey -- share the common error of presuming to characterize a metaphysical Being who is concealed from us. His very nature makes Him impossible to divine; therefore we err by jumping to any generalizations.
A person is brought to religion by subjective experience far more than he is by theological or academic arguments. Some, too based on their character, find some arguments more convincing than others. The supporter of the cosmological argument, for instance, naturally and logically deduces that all has a beginning; the world must have too. The proponent of the teleological argument is likely someone who is awed by the wonders of the world. Ultimately, it is subjective and underlying all of this is William James' description of a mystical something that a religious person feels with God.
This sense is sublime and something that evades physical description. According to James, the conversion causes four things to happen in the person:
(1) A sense of a personified "Ideal Power," and of the interrelationship of cosmos. (James describes this as "enveloping friendliness.")
(2) A surrender to the benevolence of this Power
(3) A sense of
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