The God Confusion: Why Nobody Knows the Answer to the Ultimate Question

217 Pages·2013·0.97 MB·English

by  Gary Cox

THE GOD CONFUSION
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THE GOD CONFUSION
Why nobody knows the answer
to the ultimate question
GARY COX
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2013
© Gary Cox, 2013
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be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN: 978–1–6235–6921–1
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may
be true.
(Blaise Pascal, Pensées, p. 4)

CONTENTS
Introduction 1
1 The idea of God 11
The supreme being 13
The divine attributes – perfect in every way 14
The divine attributes – everywhere all the time 20
Summary of the divine attributes 27
2 The origins of the idea of God 31
Descartes – the idea of God is God-given 32
Experiencing God – perception or hallucination? 35
Inventing God to fill the gaps 38
Freud – God as big daddy 43
Durkheim – God as the symbol of society 46
Marx – God as a sedative 47
3 The existence of God 53
The theistic arguments 58
The ontological argument 61
Anselm’s ontological argument 61
Anselm and Gaunilo debate 65
Aquinas dismisses the ontological argument 69
Descartes revives the ontological argument 72
viii CONTENTS
Why the ontological argument fails 75
The cosmological argument 80
The unmoved mover argument 83
The uncaused cause argument 86
The contingency and necessity argument 95
Why the cosmological argument fails 101
The teleological argument 111
Aristotle to Paley – the history of the teleological
argument 115
Why the teleological argument fails 122
Evolution – an unassailable theory 130
Hume hammers home the final nail 138
The fourth way – the argument from degree 141
Why the argument from degree fails 145
The moral argument 149
Why the moral argument fails 154
4 Evil and God 163
Natural evil and moral evil 165
Spelling out the problem of evil 167
Theodicy – the free will defence 168
Theodicy – soul making 174
5 Conclusions 183
Bibliography 195
Index 199
INTRODUCTION
In a book I wrote a few years ago called How to Be a Philosopher
I tackle the so-called tree question: ‘When a tree falls over in a
forest and there is no one around, does it make a sound?’ One
approach to this question that is considered in that book is that
of the idealist philosopher, Bishop George Berkeley.
Berkeley argues that there are no material things, only collec-
tions of ideas that are perceived by a mind. So-called things,
as collections of appearances, must appear to a mind in order
to have any reality. Hence Berkeley’s famous maxim, ‘To be is
to be perceived.’ This immediately raises the problem of how a
tree or any other object continues to be when there is no one
perceiving it.
Berkeley offers what is in one sense a very neat solution to this
problem. A tree that I am not currently perceiving continues to
exist because God perceives it! God, being God, perceives every-
thing all the time and so maintains the objective existence of the
entire world simply by thinking about it. God continually thinks
all those collections of ideas we call things and so prevents them
from being merely subjective and from going out of existence
when we are not perceiving them.