What sort of things was he able to find out? I read a bit about Thomas Aquinas a few years ago, but don't remember a whole lot.
Well, I wouldn't say he "found out" anything exactly! But he begins with the Dionysian claim that God transcends all comprehensible categories, and argues from that that since God therefore lacks location, size, number, etc., he must be perfectly simple. This perfect simplicity is, for Aquinas, God's prime characteristic, and all of the other divine properties derive from it. E.g. if God is perfectly simple then there is no distinction in him between essence and existence, which means that his essence
is existence, which means not only that God necessarily exists but that he just
is existence in some sense. And so on. Aquinas can maintain all of this despite holding that we don't know anything about God through his doctrine of analogical language: everything we say about God is applied analogically, that is, kind of metaphorically. So none of this is literally true, but it still is true.
I found the Terry Eagleton article extremely interesting, but am forced into something of a hole by it. I understand the idea that our rational machinery would not be able to detect Eagleton's god, and the extremely valid point that Dawkins' atheism rests itself on a great deal of unspoken faith. However, I'm not sure - given that you define God as something that exists outside the universe, and could never be detected or disproven with rational equipment - where Eagleton is coming from when he argues that Christian belief is based on rational argument built up on faith. Rational argument tells me that such an entity could exist, but how does it incline me to believe that it does?
Who is "you" here? I don't think I would agree with this - I would not say that God, if he exists, must necessarily be undetectable or unprovable through reason. Does Eagleton say this? I doubt it, as it's not the Catholic position - the Catholic Church teaches that God's
can be rationally proven.
Still, there are people who argue that God's existence can't be proven, but it's still rational to believe in him. There are three ways to do this. One is the Swinburne way, which is to say that although we can't
prove God's existence we can show that it's very probable, and it's rational to believe things that are very probable. The second is the alternate Swinburne way (although he combines it with the first), which is to say that it's rational to accept experience at face value unless you have good reason to doubt it, and it's therefore rational to accept that religious experiences are veridical. The third way is the Plantinga way, which is to accept that God's existence can't be proved or even shown through evidence to be probable, but to assert that it's nevertheless rational to believe it because "it is rational to believe X" is not equivalent to "there is good evidence for X".
Most curious for Plotinus' response to those interesting issues.
I came upon another issue, which I wasn't sure where to post, until I raelized that by extension this also holds true for theology:
Shocker. But here's why:
How does one respond to that?
Well it's clearly not true, though of course Hawking has a track record of asserting that science has taken over everything that philosophy used to do - but then he's no philosopher! For one thing, there are areas of philosophy that aren't connected to scientific questions at all, notably ethics. For another, as soon as you start talking about what science is or how it works, you're really doing philosophy, even if you don't call it that. This is what philosophy of science is. And there are plenty of issues that are connected to scientific ones but which can't be resolved through the scientific method - such as, of course, whether there's a God. There are less airy-fairy ones too, and these are the domain of areas such as philosophy of physics. It's striking how some physicists have tried to draw philosophical implications from physics, without apparently realising that they're philosophy, and that they've done so in a rather amateur way. The best example I know is John Wheeler's "It From Bit" theory that information precedes medium, which the philosophers of physics who I know, at least, don't think very much of - and quite right too, as far as I can tell.
Actually, Dawkins doesn't really 'argue from complexity'. He need only point to the design flaws in animals to question the existence of an Intelligent Designer.* Arguing from complexity is often used by misguided creationists, who fail to realize that that argument basically undermines their own position.
He does argue from complexity, though - his point is that the universe is very complex, so its cause must be at least as complex. So if you say that God created the universe you've not explained where the complexity comes from. But I don't think it's a very good argument because it assumes that whatever property the effect has, the cause must have. Funnily enough Aquinas makes the same mistake. But it's obviously not true - e.g. you can make fire by rubbing two sticks together, even though fire is hot and the sticks aren't. And I see no reason why a simple cause couldn't have complex effects.
