Drakodan Posted:

If you want some half-convincing arguments for God’s existence that you can analyze and think over yourself, read up on some Aquinas and Paley. They’re still flawed, and have opponents that effectively question them, but they’re more successful than Pascal. You could also try out some Kant, but thats a bit more difficult to get the hang of.

For anti-God purposes, Hume’s your man. He pretty much invented religious scepticism.

Log in to see images! Hume

One part of the exam for Philosophy A-level was a 4-5 thousand word essay (we drafted it, condensed it to 100 words of notes, then had to type up the real thing in 4 hours under exam conditions) from a choice of questions — mine was comparing Descartes vs. Hume on the subject of what we can know about the external world.

Descartes pulls a lot of bull**** and concludes that because we know we exist (I think therefore I am) and hence that god exists (ideas in our mind that supposedly can’t come from anywhere else) and we know that god isn’t deceiving us (because he’s perfect, and deception indicates a fault of character) then we can know that the world exists and is as we perceive it.

Hume took the other tack; we can’t trust our senses, we can’t ever escape the fact that our experience of the world is subjective, and anything we think we know about the world is founded on cause and effect, which can’t actually be proven to be a valid principle. Thus we can’t know **** about the world, but we carry on bumuming we do out of habit. He did also challenge even the seeming certainty of our subjective existence (essentially what Chawin said; “there are thoughts. thoughts do not mean i exist. thoughts mean there are thoughts”.) but I wasn’t so taken by the idea that a thought could exist independently of a mind.