Вестник Православного Свято-Тихоновского гуманитарного университета: Серия I. Богословие, философия (Dec 2022)
Criticism of positive theistic arguments in the polemic of theism and atheism
Abstract
In the article the author analyzes the arguments of the theist W.L. Craig for the existence of the omnipotent, all-good, timeless God of classical theism as well as counter-arguments of W. Sinnot-Armstrong. W.L. Craig used five arguments, they are Kalam cosmological argument, fine-tuning argument, objective moral values argument, argument from the testimonies of the gospels and argument from religious experience. Craig seeks to show that when we take all these arguments together, they increase the probability of the existence of the God of classical theism. Sinnot-Armstrong, in turn, criticized all these arguments and seeks to show with varying levels of credibility that every Craig’s argument can be refuted within the framework of an atheistic approach. He exposes the argument from the existence of objective moral values to the most detailed criticism, while speaking from the position of moral realism and Platonism. Sinnot-Armstrong criticized fine-tuning argument least convincingly. He accepted the fact that there is no good atheistic response to this argument, but he used usual rhetorical attacks against theism. He uncritically repeated the model of the war between science and religion. As a result of the analysis of the controversy between Craig and Sinnot-Armstrong, the author of the article comes to several conclusions. Firstly, atheism is combined with various metaphysical attitudes, from naturalism to Platonism. Secondly, an atheist may hold different views on the problem of free will between determinism and indeterminism. Thus, since atheism is very heterogeneous in itself, most of the Sinnot-Armstrong counter-arguments are not universally applicable to atheists.
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