Although Pascal stated that people needed to make a gamble on God, he also stated that there is a way in winning in the gamble, believing in God. Pascal said that if you are wrong and God exists then you stand to lose a great deal. For a start you will lose happiness that is possible during the journey of life and also you will forever condemn in to hell. If God does exist you will have eternal happiness got to a destination beyond the grave and be happy forevermore.
Pascal makes a very logical and viable point. You need to make a gamble when it comes to the existence of God so if you’re going to gamble why not take the side with the better odds. Pascal makes a compelling case when he says that if you don’t believe in God and he actually does exist you will never be happy and will suffer for endless years and be condemned to hell. However if he does exist and you believe in God you will be eternally trouble free, happy and have a fulfilling “after life”. If God doesn’t exist nothing will happen, so it is only logical (according Pascal’s Wager [Theory]) to believe in God.
Ludwig Feuerbach
Ludwig Feuerbach was born on July 28, 1804 and died on September 13, 1872. He was a German philosopher and anthropologist. Ludwig believed that God simply does not exist due to the fact that he believed that man created a figure called God in need for himself, meaning that Man needs something to believe on or in. He believed that God was projection of a person’s imagination who was Omni powerful, present, benevolent and knowledgeable.
Personally I really did not like Feuerbach’s theory because it is making an extremely big assumption that man created a figure called God in need for himself. There is no physical proof or written evidence for this blasphemy. Feuerbach is trying to say that man created God because they did not like the idea of nothing after death. There is no strong evidence that states that God does exist but there isn’t any that God does not exist as well. Feuerbach’s theory is especially flawed due to the fact that he doesn’t really have logical or physical proof that God does not exist.
William Paley
William Paley was born in June 1743 and died on the 25th of May 1805. He was British Christian apologist, philosopher and utilitarian. Paley believed that there had to be a creator (God) in this world because it is so complex. Paley once saw a pocket watch lying on the ground in nature and he stated that the watch is so complex that there had to be a person who designed it. He used the theory in the case of the creation of the universe, because the universe is extremely diverse and complex there had to be a creator who designed it. I disagree with this argument because there are so many flaws.
The “watch” may look complex because we have seen other “watches” before and therefore we can compare different watches to each other, so we cannot say that our universe is “complex” because we have nothing else to compare it to. There may be more complex things that our universe out there it’s just that we had never seen or experienced it. Also everything we do know about the universe tells us that it was formed not created.
Furthermore complex events and things are created all the time. For an example a snowflake is created without a “creator” or intellect and the earth's moon creates tides and it has no intellect or a creator as well. Paley stated that God does exist through the watchmaker analogy however if God does exist why is there so much suffering in the world and why do some people live better lives then others?
St Thomas Aquinas
St Thomas Aquinas was an Italian Dominican Priest of the Catholic Church who was an immensely influential philosopher and theologian. St Thomas believed that God exists because the universe wouldn’t have come out of nothing. Everything has a cause. He said that “something” cannot come from “no-thing” therefore the universe must have a cause. He believed that the first cause is God due to the fact that God is the only uncaused cause. To support this Aquinas used an example of motion. He said that nothing can be moved from a state of potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality. He is trying to say that if something moved something would have had to move it before for it to move. Logically this makes complete sense however I believe there are some flaws with this “argument”. I believe that this theory does not prove that God exist because the uncaused cause does not necessarily have to be God. The uncaused cause can and could have been anything.
