Exam 4: Plato the Beginning of Everything

Which of Aquinas's five proofs do you find to be the strongest? The weakest? Explain your answers.

Conway says, "And farther, seeing it is already demonstrated, that God is a necessary agent, and does whatever He can do, it must be that He does multiply, and yet still continues to multiply and augment the essences of creatures ad hoc."

Mackie says, "In its simplest form the problem is this: God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; and yet _____________. There seems to be some contradiction between these three propositions, so that if any two of them were true the third would be false."

Cleanthes asserts, "Therefore, the words necessary existence have no meaning." Do you agree with Cleanthes? How does it affect Demea's argument?

Conway says, "Seeing then that in him there is no time, nor any mutability, hence it is that in him there can exist no new knowledge or Will, but his knowledge and Will are ..."

Kierkegaard says, "But between the God and his works there is an absolute relationship; God is not a name but a ________. Is this perhaps the reason that his essentia involvit existentiam [essence involves existence]?"

Lammenranta asserts that "Descartes says that clear and distinct perception can provide knowledge only if it is perfectly reliable. Thus, he cannot know the premises of his argument for the truth of clear and distinct perceptions unless clear and distinct perceptions are _______, because these premises are themselves based on clear and distinct perception."

Explain Lammenranta's point when he says, "The problem is not whether knowledge is possible. It is whether we in fact have it."

Paley says that even if "we had never seen a watch made; that we had never known an artist capable of making one; that we were altogether incapable of executing such a piece of workmanship ourselves, or of understanding in what manner it was performed," nevertheless, we would still conclude that ...

Do you think that Paley's argument for the existence of God is strong? Explain your answer.

It is asserted in the reading that "Everything that becomes or is created must of necessity be created by some natural deduction."

Leibniz says, "It is also through the knowledge of necessary truths, and through their abstract expression, that we rise to acts of reflection, which make us think of what is called I, and observe that this or that is within us."

Berkeley claims that the ideas of Sense are less dependent on the spirit, or thinking substance which perceives them, "yet still they are ideas, and certainly no idea, whether faint or strong, can exist otherwise than in an eternal locus."

Explain Aquinas's second proof for the existence of God. Do you agree with Aquinas?

According to Demea, "The unity too of the Divine Nature, it is very difficult, if not absolutely impossible, to deduce merely from contemplating the ..."

According to Cleanthes, "Nothing is demonstrable, unless the contrary implies a contradiction."

According to Mackie, it is sometimes suggested that "Good cannot exist without evil." But Mackie criticizes this position when he says, "humans do not have free will."

For James, the decision between two hypotheses is a conjecture.

According to Parsons, "if any (even one) actual evil is gratuitous, that is, if a perfectly good, all-powerful creator would not have a morally sufficient reason for permitting it, then God cannot exist."

Kierkegaard says, "What then is the Unknown? It is the limit to which the ________ repeatedly comes."