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Faith and the Existence of God: Arguments for the Existence of God
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Extract
Arguments move from premises to conclusions. The premises state things taken temporally for granted; if the argument works, the premises provide grounds for affirming the conclusion. A valid deductive argument is one in which the premises necessitate, that is, entail, the conclusion. (It would involve a self-contradiction to assert the premises but deny the conclusion.) What I shall call a ‘correct’ inductive argument is one in which the premises in some degree probabilify the conclusion, but do not necessitate it. More precisely, in what I shall call a correct P-inductive argument the premises make the conclusion probable (i.e. more probable than not); in what I shall call a correct C-inductive argument, the premises add to the probability of the conclusion (i.e. confirm it, make it more probable than it was; but do not necessarily make it overall probable). Arguments only show their conclusions to be true if they start from true premises; arguments of the above types which work (i.e. are valid or correct) and do start from such premises I will call sound arguments. Arguments are only of use to show to an individual that the conclusion is true if he already knows the premises to be true. Most of what I shall have to say today concerns arguments with respect to which there is no doubt that the premises are true.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1988
References
Notes
1 This paper is based on the much fuller and more rigorous account which I gave of a posteriori arguments for the existence of God in my book, The Existence of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). (Some of the wording of this present paper is taken from a small pamphlet which I wrote for a different purpose, Evidence for God, published by Mowbrays for the Christian Evidence Society, 1986. I am grateful to the society for permission to re-use this material.) For detailed criticism of my approach, see J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).
2 See Plantinga, A. (ed.), The Ontological Argument (London: Macmillan, 1968)Google Scholar, and many other collections of writings on the philosophy of religion for the versions of the ontological argument given by Anselm and Descartes, and a modern version given by Norman Malcolm.
3 More formally, they are correct C-inductive arguments if the phenomena cited as evidence are more likely to occur if the hypothesis is true than otherwise; and the more each of the criteria is satisfied, the more probable on the evidence is the hypothesis.
4 See Kenny, A., The Five Ways (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969)Google Scholar, for exposition and criticism of Aquinas' ‘ways’.
5 Leibniz, G. W., On the Ultimate Origination of Things.Google Scholar
6 See, for example, the simple description of this fine-tuning in Leslie, John, ‘Anthropic Principle, World Ensemble, Design’, American Philosophical Quarterly 19 (1982), 141–151.Google Scholar
7 Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 4.10.10.Google Scholar
8 See (e.g.) Kant, I., Critique of Practical Reason, 1.2.2.5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar