Exam 2: Religion

Plato and Aristotle heavily influenced __________.

The third "proof" of God's existence is usually called the argument from design, or __________.

Kant argued that the existence of a thing can be a matter of logic.

In John Wisdom's metaphor about the beautiful garden, the gardener symbolizes __________.

The __________ argument attests that God contains all possible perfection and existence is perfect; therefore, God exists.

To step outside ourselves, to consider the world from an impersonal perspective, called "personal nihility" by __________, is an intimate and unique activity.

Kant argued that existence was just a predicate like other predicates.

Friedrich Nietzsche thought that Christianity was an expression of everything that is __________ in human nature.

The God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam lacks any anthropomotphic qualities, His emotions are purley God like and reflect nothing of human undersranding.

Three major sets of "proofs" have emerged as attempts to demonstrate God's existence. They are called (1) the ontological argument, (2) the cosmological argument, and (3) the teleological argument.

Taken at face value, the first three versions of the cosmological argument are similar to _________ argument for the "prime mover."

Tillich expanded the idea of God to represent a meaningless existence.

__________ said that belief in God was a matter of faith. But this was not an irrational belief. On the contrary, he insisted that the belief in God was the most rational belief of all.

Friedrich Schleiermacher insisted that religion was simply a matter of intense feelings of dependence, nothing more.

Hume argued that if God built the universe, He wasn't a very good architect. Some theists respond that the universe was built as well as it could be and that any changes would make it only worse. Do you find this response convincing? The poet Wallace Stevens once wrote a letter to his wife claiming that "with a wishing lamp and a bucket of sand I could make a world better than this one." Do you agree with Stevens? Can you imagine a better world? What would you change?

William Paley argued primarily from the idea of the ____________, which attributes purpose to the creation of the world.

_______ is St. Thomas Aquinas's first argument for the existence of God.

In Buddhism, the problem of evil is avoided entirely because Buddhism abandons any conception of an anthropomorphic God.

The argument from design, known as intelligent design, has the form of an _______.

Aquinas admitted that there was no valid argument against the claim that God and the universe existed for all eternity.