God is real. I am a theist. I will be objecting agnosticism. God is a spirit that has determined how a person’s life will unfold. I believe, God has all the power and from the time of conception until death he has a person’s life planned. He knows how a person will act and react in situations, treat others, and their daily actions. Going to church and having a conversation with God can make a decision or situation easier. One may find answers they have been looking for. God is here to help us. He is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good. He may not be able to be seen but he is there. God does have all the answers and “talking” to him can help. He determines how you will spend your life. Some things may not always go as planned but God …show more content…
Faith and reason complement each other because they are rational for God’s existence. Faith is the rational trusting in the unverified testimony of God. Believing God controls all things without ever seeing or touching him. The thought of seeking to show God does certainly exist, solely based on necessary metaphysical truths. Aquinas described God existence the best, God is the all mighty power “Hence there is some intelligent being by whom all natural things are directed to their goal or end; and this we call ‘God’” (Aquinas, p 351). He has all the say what happens to each and every person. People may believe they are making their own decisions but God has a premade plan. All change is just a movement from the potential of the action to the actually of the action. The idea that actualizes something must be distinct from the actual actions. Actions and thoughts can be possibles. They happen because a person wants them too but they essentially come from a higher power, who is said to be God. Though some things may not be possibles there has to be a so called power, that is necessary to make these actions and thoughts happen. There are questions of how we know things want to be moved. It explains change must end in the being of something that is pure actuality. We do move them with our hand, which is told to do so by the brain. If something itself is moved, it must have been moved by something else. The brain is …show more content…
Also, the thought of God being all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good is more likely. The problem of evil argument makes God and evil very compatible. Theodicy is the attempt to point to actual reason why God allows evil. If people believe God permits evil acts in the world he is doing so in the hopes people will suffer. Suffering tends to promote moral and spiritual growth. When a bad act happens to a person undeserving of the act they turn to God for the answers. Knowing he will provide them with the answers they are looking for keeping the doubters coming back and eventually believing God is an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good spirit. If people did have the power to decide their fate there would be more evil. It is like a domino reaction, if one person does something evil and does not receive the consequences they deserve it is more likely the next person will not be as hesitant to choose the right path. God knows when evil is going to happen and fixes it as9o he deems necessary. People are imperfect but that is what makes the society whole and functional. It is true natural disasters and diseases, the physical evils, cannot be prevented but God does have a way to handle those situations to make it for the better of the world. When hurricanes happen and destroy a town, people come together to work as one to make the situation of the town or city better than it was before. Moral evil does not exist. People do not just
In his essay, "The Magnitude, Duration, and Distribution of Evil: a Theodicy," Peter van Inwagen alleges a set of reasons that God may have for allowing evil to exist on earth. Inwagen proposes the following story – throughout which there is an implicit assumption that God is all-good (perfectly benevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient) and deserving of all our love. God created humans in his own likeness and fit for His love. In order to enable humans to return this love, He had to give them the ability to freely choose. That is, Inwagen holds that the ability to love implies free will. By giving humans free will, God was taking a risk. As Inwagen argues, not even an omnipotent being can ensure that "a creature who has a free choice between x and y choose x rather than y" (197)1. (X in Inwagen’s story is ‘to turn its love to God’ and y is ‘to turn its love away from God,’ towards itself or other things.) So it happened that humans did in fact rebel and turn away from God. The first instance of this turning away is referred to as "the Fall." The ruin of the Fall was inherited by all humans to follow and is the source of evil in the world. But God did not leave humans without hope. He has a plan "whose working will one day eventuate in the Atonement (at-one-ment) of His human creatures with Himself," or at least some of His human creatures (198). This plan somehow involves humans realizing the wretchedness of a world without God and turning to God for help.
Faith is in the heart and as has been said, the heart has reason which reason cannot understand. So if it were a fight over finding rationality, it would not be fully supported because finding the complete and total reason for faith will never be found.
There is a lot of evil in the world, and much of it happens unexplainably. In the history of life on Earth bad things have happened and evil has caused problems. In relation to some world wide events, 6 million people died in the holocaust, 65 million people died in the war, 800 thousand died in the Rwanda genocide and 230 thousand people died in the 2004 boxing day tsunami. There is a lot of human suffering in the world, but there is also suffering of animals too. A lot of suffering in humans is due to other humans, however some of it can be caused by non-human causes, such as natural disasters etc. Under religious beliefs god was the creator of life on Earth, so if he was all good, powerful and knowing then he would be capable of at least preventing natural disasters from erupting as they cause life to undergo suffering. Likewise, capable of preventing human suffering from natural disasters, i.e. saving people from hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes etc…
The problem of reconciling an omnipotent, perfectly just, perfectly benevolent god with a world full of evil and suffering has plagued believers since the beginning of religious thought. Atheists often site this paradox in order to demonstrate that such a god cannot exist and, therefore, that theism is an invalid position. Theodicy is a branch of philosophy that seeks to defend religion by reconciling the supposed existence of an omnipotent, perfectly just God with the presence of evil and suffering in the world. In fact, the word “theodicy” consists of the Greek words “theos,” or God, and “dike,” or justice (Knox 1981, 1). Thus, theodicy seeks to find a sense of divine justice in a world filled with suffering.
Today, we see evil everywhere like murder, rape, stealing, injustice is all shown daily on the news. Philip Yancey in “Where is God When It Hurts,” shows throughout the book evil, what evil does to people and the world. For example, evil caused Donna to have leukemia (Yancey 250). Theodicy was created to defend others when people say that ‘God causes evil’ but in realitic God does not cause the evil that happen in the world it humans that causes evil.
Whether god exists or not has been in discussion for thousands of years, and an important discussion. Whether it is rational to believe in god or not is another story, like believing in god itself, this topic has brought many discussions. It is one thing to discuss whether god is real or not and it is a complete other to discuss whether it is rational to believe in god or not. I believe that while there may not be any convincing evidence or arguments that God does exist, I do still believe that it is still rational to believe that god does exist. I think this because, believing in God is not simply just believing that he exists, but believing that it can bring good to our lives, we otherwise would not have. It teaches us to have a moral responsibility not only to others, but ourselves. It is obvious that many people do believe in god, but many of us choose to do so for reasons other than just believing in God. I do believe that just because there is no evidence, that does not mean God doesn’t exist. Like I said, God brings more to our lives than just a belief, but an ability to achieve a better one. And even if God is just an imaginary figure, he is an imaginary figure that brings hope and goodness to our lives, which we can never discount.
The point is that matter can change and all could be your imagination and not necessarily real.
He remains this way to serve as a check for each god's involvement in the
Theology is an intentionally reflective endeavor. Every day we reflect upon the real, vital, and true experience of the benevolent God that exists. We as humans tend to be social beings, and being so we communicate our beliefs with one another in order to validate ourselves. Furthermore atheism has many forms, three of the most popular atheistic beliefs include: scientific atheism, humanistic atheism and the most popular one being protest atheism. Scientific atheism is the idea that science is the answer for everything and god is not existent. The humanistic approach states that society is self-sufficient; therefore God is not needed for survival. Therefore how could he exist? The position that I will argue in this paper is the pessimistic idea of protest atheism.
God’s Existence: Real or Fake? In the harsh winter of 1943, the prisoners of the concentration camps in Germany and eastern Europe endured unimaginable suffering under the watchful eye of the Nazis. As the bitter winds blew through the barren, frozen landscape, the inmates, in their tattered uniforms, slogged in ankle-deep snow with their heads bowed and their spirits broken. Among these prisoners was Eli, a young man who was once a devout follower of God, who was now struggling with the shattered remnants of his faith. Witnessing the unspeakable atrocities that took place every day, only thoughts of doubt resounded in his mind and grew louder as the days went on.
In today’s modern western society, it has become increasingly popular to not identify with any religion, namely Christianity. The outlook that people have today on the existence of God and the role that He plays in our world has changed drastically since the Enlightenment Period. Many look solely to the concept of reason, or the phenomenon that allows human beings to use their senses to draw conclusions about the world around them, to try and understand the environment that they live in. However, there are some that look to faith, or the concept of believing in a higher power as the reason for our existence. Being that this is a fundamental issue for humanity, there have been many attempts to explain what role each concept plays. It is my belief that faith and reason are both needed to gain knowledge for three reasons: first, both concepts coexist with one another; second, each deals with separate realms of reality, and third, one without the other can lead to cases of extremism.
I feel that Faith and reason are correlated in many aspects, and are vital to one another. Reason precedes faith in the process of knowing God’s existence and reigning power; although one cannot truly know the reasoning of something to be known without knowledge first. Faith is built on spirituality surrounding one’s cultural beliefs, behaviors, and ...
Is reason in opposition to faith? Reason gives the impression of being about logic, evidence, proving something without emotion. Yet, reason is merely forming a conclusion. Reason does not hav...
This essay provides a conclusive look at the problems and contradictions underlying a belief in God and the observable traits of the world, specifically the Problem of Evil. The analysis will address the nature of God and the existence of evil in the world, as well as objections such as the "sorting" into heaven and hell objection, God's "mysterious ways" objection, the inscrutability of God objection, values presupposing pain objection, inherent contradictions in "God's freewill," and non-human objections. omnipotent. 2) Evil exists. 3)
2.) He could speak to us through our surroundings. How? Well, let’s just say we’re going to go somewhere, but on the way there, there’s so many things that stands on our way. There could be an accident or traffic jam, or something. At a time like that we should probably ask God again if we should continue or not because we never know what’s going to happen there.