The Way Matt Sees It

We’ve been looking at several convincing philosophical arguments for the existence of God.  We’ve seen The Cosmological Argument, The Moral Argument, the facts concerning the resurrection of the historical figure Jesus of Nazareth, and examined The Problem of Evil.  These arguments show through sound logic and argumentation that the existence of God is more plausibly true than plausibly false, and shows that God is the best explanation for the argument. EXPERIENCING GOD This time, we are considering another thought, but is not quite the same as the other arguments we’ve looked at so far.  God can be personally known and experienced. This is the immediate experience of God .  We are claiming that we can know that God exists apart from just arguments, because God can be experienced.  This is what would be considered a “properly basic belief.” PROPERLY BASIC BELIEFS What is a “properly basic belief?”  Think of it this way...

We’re looking at several philosophical arguments for God’s existence.  First we looked at the Cosmological Argument, showing that God is the best explanation for the cause of the universe.  Next we will look at the Moral Argument: God is the best explanation for the existence of objective moral values and duties. Remember what we said about argumentation: a “good” argument is a series of statements, or premises, that lead to a conclusion.   These premises must be logically sound (the conclusion follows the premises by the rules of logic), and its premises are true.   Along with this, it must be shown that there is good reason to believe that what this argument is stating is true. DEFINE THE TERMS First we need to define what we mean by “objective moral values and duties.” Objective as opposed to Subjective .   Objective means that they exist independent of opinions, belief systems, etc.   Subjective means they are dependent on these thin...