Religion, Science and God

As is well known, so it needs no elaboration from me here, the only guarantee that there is a reality independent of our human minds in Berkeley's idealism is God - because such a reality would exist at all times in his  mind. The fabled "tree in the quad" exists, even when no human is looking at it - even when no other sentient animal is looking at it - because God is doing so. There have been a number of attempts to remove God from the subjective idealist picture since Berkeley's time, of which a recent one is Helen Yetter-Chappell's 'Idealism Without God', Chapter 6, pp.66-81 in Tyron Goldschmidt and Kenneth L. Pearce, eds. (2017), Idealism. New Essays in Metaphysics , Oxford: Oxford University Press (OUP). Jonathan Head, in Chapter 3, 'Idealism in Fourfold Root', of Jonathan Head and Dennis Vanden Auweele, eds. (2016), Schopenhauer's Fourfold Root , Abingdon, Oxfordshire, England: Routledge (Taylor and Francis), argues that Schopenhauer was...

If the God of the monotheistic faiths is not one worthy of worship, then - indeed, a detestable invention, made in humanity's image, if anything, and the vile source of all the evil, pain and suffering in the universe, if not - what kind of God would be worthy of our worship and adoration? To begin with 'he' would not be a 'he' - or a 'she' or an 'it'. A whole new vocabulary would be required to refer to this deity accurately, but even that would not be adequate. I will not even begin to attempt it here. Such a being would be infinite and eternal, immortal and indestructible, like the Jewish and Christian God. S/he would also be personal - though unipersonal, not tri-personal, like the Christian deity (a nonsensical idea!), and rational. There is no question but that s/he would be transcendent and immanent, and omnibenevolent. We can assume that this being is the creator of the universe, and that s/he is omnipresent and omniscient, in the sense cont...

The term "theodicy", as is fairly well-known, was coined by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, from the Greek theos , God, dikē , justice, who tried to defend God on the basis that "all was for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds", an argument for which he was justly excoriated by Voltaire in his satire, Candide . Out of the entire set, or space, of possible worlds, which must be infinite in extent, is there, or are there, no other or others even marginally better than this one, judged by whatever criteria? The French novelist Stendhal argued that "God's only excuse is that he does not exist" ( La seule excuse de Dieu c'est n'existe-pas ). Suppose we turn that round and say, rather, that he exists, therefore he has no excuse? ( Dieu existe, donc il n'a aucune excuse. ) Let us begin by asserting that God exists, and accept that he is eternal, infinite, immortal and indestructible. Let us also accept the traditional (and orthodox) pict...

Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all fundamentally optimistic religions, insofar as they predict that, after a bit of a rough passage, the Universe ends definitively, with a final Triumph of Good over Evil, an everlasting reward for the good, and everlasting punishment for the bad. Setting aside the whole question of the justice of everlasting punishment for finite wrong, we have to ask whether or not this picture is actually compatible with what physics tells us is going to happen to the Earth, the Solar System, and our Universe. There, alas, the picture is far from being optimistic: as far as the Earth is concerned, we know that, because of the steady and relentless increase in the Sun's luminosity over time, in 1.1 billion years' time, the mean annual surface temperature of the Earth will be so hot that there will be no liquid water on the planet - all the rivers, lakes, seas and oceans will just boil away. The result of that , in turn, given that water vapour is a gree...